Getting Nervous

After 22 years of "temporary" truce, the Demilitarized Zone that partitions Korea has become, among other things, a bird sanctuary. The gigantic white-plumed Manchurian crane, an exotic type of which only 30 specimens are known to exist, now winters in the barbed-wire-lined DMZ.

Scarcely less exotic are the human rituals that take place along the border. At one point, for example, the South Koreans have built an elaborate stucco "freedom village" that is supposed to typify the comforts of capitalism; near by, the North Koreans have solemnly built a slightly larger Potemkin village of their own (its 3,000 smiling inhabitants are trucked in each day and out every night, according to U.S. officials).

Every day at noon, U.S. and North Korean officers meet at the border to exchange information about the state of the truce. The Americans invariably stand at least 6 ft. tall, and the smaller Koreans just as invariably make sure that their own chairs are slightly raised so that they cannot be looked down upon. (The Koreans' language is no less belligerent. Recent sample: "You are matchlessly brazen-faced.") It was in such a setting that U.S. Major General William Webb last week indignantly presented photos of a tunnel that North Korean infiltrators had secretly dug under the DMZ; Webb's North Korean counterpart just as indignantly replied that the evidence was all fabricated.

Prepared for War. Such accusations have acquired a new urgency since the Communist takeover of Indochina. In Korea, where many remember the Communist invasion that began 25 years ago this month, there are widespread fears of a new attack. North Korea's hard-lining Communist President Kim Il Sung, newly returned from a conference in Peking last month, increased Southern fears by declaring: "We are prepared for war." South Korea's strongman President Park Chung Hee responded with equal bellicosity, warning that the South is also ready for a fight. In this policy, Park has the support of even the opposition politicians. At a special session of the National Assembly, they joined in unanimous support of a government-sponsored resolution "to crush any provocation or invasion by North Korea."

New Airstrips. Are Park's fears real or designed to solidify his increasingly autocratic 14-year rule? "Oh, I think he is 70% genuine and 30% cynical," says a senior U.S. official in Seoul. The fact is that Kim has never accepted the existence of an independent, non-Communist South. In the past couple of years, he has not only launched repeated terrorist attacks across the border, but has also built a series of airstrips and naval ports close to the truce line. Recently he shifted two fully armored divisions to positions close to the DMZ. "There has been a change up North," notes Professor Kim Chum Kon, director of the Institute of Security and International Affairs in Seoul. A well-known critic of the Park government, Kim warns that the North "is moving away from a defensive posture" and is "shifting toward the offensive."

If an attack comes, the South can count on numerical superiority on the ground. Its tough, well-trained 625,000-man regular army would face only 470,000 Northern soldiers. Moreover, many of the South's officers gained valuable battlefield experience in South Viet Nam. In the air, however, the North enjoys a 3-to-1 advantage in planes. The South must therefore rely on U.S. fighter-bombers based at two airfields in South Korea and on the carriers of the Seventh Fleet.

Seoul also relies on the presence of nearly 40,000 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea as a symbol of Washington's intention to honor its 1953 defense treaty with Seoul. The treaty pledges that if South Korea is attacked, the U.S. will come to its aid "in accordance with its [U.S.] constitutional processes." Nonetheless, in the wake of the Communist victories in Indochina, Seoul is nervous about American reliability. "We hope the U.S. will demonstrate by deeds its firm determination not to commit the same failures in the Korean peninsula as it did in the Indochina peninsula," said a recent National Assembly resolution. A Harris poll late last year, however, reported that if a new Korean war broke out, 65% of Americans would oppose U.S. intervention.

Most U.S. experts believe that while Seoul's fears of an imminent attack may have some justification, they are nonetheless exaggerated. Indeed U.S. officials believe that Peking has recently been cautioning North Korea's Kim not to attack South Korea. They feel that China does not want a diminished U.S. presence in South Korea, since that would remove a valuable counterforce to Soviet influence in East Asia. Moreover, the argument goes, both Moscow and Peking fear that a new Korean war in which U.S. troops were involved would lead to a serious deterioration in their relations with Washington; a war would also prompt Japan to begin building a powerful military force.

But there is a less sanguine argument: that Kim Il Sung will ignore the Russians and Chinese. Pentagon officials estimate that North Korea has enough supplies on hand to sustain a three-month offensive; and Kim may be confident that if he were embroiled in a war, neither Moscow nor Peking could afford to ignore his pleas to resupply him. Now 63 years old and rumored to be in poor health, Kim may feel that he is running out of time to reunite Korea. The real danger, as some South Koreans see it, is that Kim will underestimate both the U.S. commitment and South Korea's strength. "There must be no room for miscalculation in the North," South Korea's Premier Kim Chong Pil told TIME Correspondent William Stewart. "That is why we keep emphasizing vigilance and unity."

Prison Threats. Some U.S. officials fear that Park's harsh emphasis on "vigilance" may alienate many Koreans from his regime. Last month he issued a series of stern decrees that put the country under a "wartime emergency system" and increased the considerable powers of the police and Korean Central Intelligence Agency. Presidential emergency measure No. 9, for example, threatens stiff prison sentences for any act "denying, opposing, distorting or defaming the constitution." Such regulations have so intimidated the South Korean press that no newspaper dared carry the story that Park's party had demanded a gift of $10 million from Gulf Oil--and actually received $4 million. The news was deemed "detrimental to national solidarity."

Premier Kim Chong Pil defends these tough measures: "Our cardinal problem is survival. Freedom to the point of license hurts us. The critics who talk about the lack of freedom here would be the same ones who, if we were overrun, would say: 'Those stupid Koreans, they couldn't prepare themselves to stand up against the North.' " In an important but limited sense, the Premier is correct. Seoul's most important weapon against the North is the passionate anti-Communism that unites South Korea's 33.5 million people. But there is probably a limit to the repression that South Koreans will endure, even in the name of national security.

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