Seoul Letter: A South Korean politician once described living in Seoul as like being chained to a lunatic. There is no telling what volatile northern neighbour Pyongyang will do next, writes David McNeill
Just 60km north of this gleaming city of glass and steel - reduced to smoking ruins the last time the two sides fought, half a century ago - lies the most-heavily militarised border on the planet, the absurdly named demilitarised zone. Beyond that is the hermit kingdom of Kim Jong-il.
If war erupts again, North Korean missiles will rain down on Seoul, and Pyongyang's 1.1 million army will charge across the 2½km mined strip of no man's land that separates the divided peninsula.
Even the most optimistic scenarios predict thousands of casualties among the 10 million people here.
Odd then to find most Seoul folk quite relaxed, despite the launch of a clutch of North Korean missiles last week.
South Korea was slower to react to the missiles than either Japan or the U,S and has been much more low-key in its response since. A regional typhoon is a bigger story.
While Japan and the US have spent much time since pushing the UN for long-threatened sanctions against Pyongyang, the South Korean government of president Roh Moo-hyun seems angrier at the sabre-rattling from Tokyo than from Pyongyang.
"We have said the North's missile launches were unacceptable provocations that seriously disturb the peace and stability of northeast Asia," said Seoul government spokesman Jung Tae-ho this week. "But Japanese leaders worsened the crisis by making dangerous and provocative remarks."
Those remarks came from Shinzo Abe, Tokyo's chief cabinet secretary and the man widely tipped to replace prime minister Junichiro Koizumi this autumn. Earlier this week, he floated the idea of a pre-emptive strike against the North's missiles, "if there were no other option to prevent an attack".
Many Koreans have watched with amusement as the US TV networks fill up with talking heads predicting the bloodcurdling consequences of not confronting the North Korean menace.
"It's laughable," says Yu-Jin Chang, editor of internet news service OhMy News.
"I mean, the long-range missile exploded 40 seconds into its flight but, in the States, they're saying that three-quarters of their country is under threat. They need to calm down."
As many in Seoul are quick to point out, they have been living closer to the problem than anyone else for 50 years, and indeed are still officially at war with their northern cousins, so they know all the angles.
Comedians here joke that Kim Jong-il has secretly invested in Raytheon, one of the US weapons contractors commissioned to build America's hugely expensive missile defence system, because it is likely to be one of the few beneficiaries of his brief fireworks display.
There are hardliners in the South who agree with the US and Japan that the North must be confronted, but newspaper surveys find a growing number - almost half in the latest poll by the Korea Times - believe that Washington is "the biggest barrier to reunification".
The South's government is committed to the "sunshine" policy of reconciliation and co-operation, a strategy built around the flagship Inter-Korean Kaesong project, an industrial park just inside the North's borders.
Seoul hopes Kaesong will transplant capitalism into the North, mutating its calcified state-run economy in the way that special enterprise zones have transformed China.
It is an approach that has been criticised for offering too much carrot and not enough stick, and it could take generations, admits Seoul's ambassador to Japan, Ra Jong-il, but the alternative is war or regime change, chaos and millions of poor North Korean refugees flooding the South's cities.
These things may happen anyway but, understandably, the South wants to control the direction of events as far as it can, and believes that, as the first target of a strike from Pyongyang, it has more right to do so than either Japan or the US.
So the South, barring any major political upheaval, will plod its own path and, whether Washington likes it or not, continue to see method in the North's madness.
"I'm not saying the North isn't dangerous, but people forget that it is America that has deployed nuclear missiles around the Peninsula for decades," says Mr Chang. "It has attacked one country on the axis of evil and is threatening a second, so North Korea is frightened.
"The idea that this is just a sudden, irrational decision by a mad dictator to deploy weapons may be comforting, but it's absurd. The North is acting rationally from its own perspective."