Does North Korea have tunnels under Seoul?
Gen. Hahn Sung-Chu never believed North Korea could dig a tunnel that reached Seoul — until now.
Standing inside a basement of an apartment block in the heart of the capital, the former two-star general in the South Korean military says, “This is a kind of invasion, North Korean soldiers working underneath us.”
Hahn says residents had complained of underground vibrations, but the subway does not run beneath them. [CNN]
I’d be much more surprised if the North Koreans didn’t have tunnels under Seoul. Nor is this the most outlandish claim I’ve heard about the extent of those tunnels.
This guy works with a cab driver using divining rods held over maps of Korea to ‘find’ tunnels. He reckons there are tunnels going all the way down to Busan.
I’m certainly no believer in dowsing, but whatever you think of this particular claim, it’s reasonable to assume that the North Koreans have tunneled as far as Seoul. Why not? New York’s water supply goes through the Delaware Aqueduct, which is 85 miles through solid rock. Follow that second link and you’ll see another claim that the tunnels go all the way to Kunsan. And yes, that seems very far-fetched.
I have no doubt that they do have tunnels going pretty far, but I’d wonder at this stage how many of them are still functional, and how capable their conventional forces are at moving through them (NKSOF will be fine, but they have lots of other options for infiltration anyway).
In related news, I wonder how often the North suffers mining accidents. You hear about a fair number of Chinese mining accidents, but never much about the same happening to the Norks; I can’t imagine their rate is lower. I also imagine this would affect the readiness of DPRK infiltration tunnels, but to what extent is a Rumsfeldian unknown-unknown.
In unrelated news, even Vice News is running stories about a civil war in the DPRK leadership
https://news.vice.com/article/former-top-official-says-kim-jong-un-is-no-longer-in-control-of-north-korea?utm_source=vicenewstwitter
If true, shouldn’t this be fairly easy to prove? Aren’t there geological tools that can detect underground air pockets, or some such thing? If they can pinpoint it as precisely as one apartment block, it ought to be provable by digging straight down.
If they had any of importance they would have used them already.