Why Is North Korea Digging?

Like moles who will not rest, North Korean construction battalions continued to dig, dig, dig their way into South Korea. For all anyone knows, they’re at it still.

South Korean military engineers have found another tunnel running beneath the 155-mile-long demilitarized zone that divides their country and North Korea, the fourth to be discovered in the last 16 years. Seoul says satellite photos showing underground “axis lines” and other surface details point to the probable existence of another 20 or more tunnels. It’s known that North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung ordered work begun on the project nearly 20 years ago. Construction noises led to the discovery of three tunnels in the 1970s. After that, North Korea invested heavily in Swedish excavators with noise-repressing equipment, and work continued apace.

The tunnels so far found are anything but little shafts. Each is wide enough and high enough to allow soldiers to march three-abreast without stooping. The engineering difficulties involved--the clandestine digging and disposal of great volumes of rock and dirt--were clearly considerable. In some cases the tunnels burrow through solid granite; one runs as much as 490 feet beneath the surface. It’s a safe guess the tunnels weren’t built just to keep North Korea’s troops out of the rain. Their only plausible purpose is to infiltrate commando units into rear areas, either to wage guerrilla warfare or to support a frontal invasion.

U.S. and South Korea officials take the tunnels very seriously, and so they should. The two Koreas remain in the state of war that has existed ever since Communist North Korea invaded the south 40 years ago. The tunnels are clearly expensive, labor-intensive, time-consuming projects. That Kim was willing to invest a lot of scarce resources in them is visible proof that his old dreams of military conquest have not faded. It seems that, with all the changes going on in the Communist world, Kim Il Sung’s North Korea is one place where time has stopped.