If you drive your ball off the fairway on the golf course at Panmunjom, don't go looking for it. The rough is part of the world's longest minefield, stretching in a narrow band 154 miles across the Korean peninsula just south of the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) between the two Koreas.
It was to maintain this killing field, which holds one million mines, that President Bill Clinton refused to endorse a treaty banning landmines last month, arguing that they are needed to deter the one million-strong North Korean army from invading the South.
The arithmetic is neat, one mine per communist soldier in the event of war. But it is not working out that way. Forty-four years after the end of the Korean War, mines along the southern section of Korea's 38th Parallel are fatally injuring and maiming at the rate of 15 a year the people they are designed to defend.
In the last five years 35 people from South Korea have been killed and 43 injured (losing feet and legs) in accidental landmine explosions, according to the Korean Defence Ministry. It refused to give details but a DMZ guide told me that 49 were soldiers and 29 civilians.
The last recorded death in the southern section of the DMZ occurred on October 11th when Private First Class Ban Yoon-soo of the South Korean army was blown up while digging a bunker. Two privates were killed when a mine exploded on March 13th.
Civilians get killed outside the officially mapped minefields. A tour guide explained that because of landslides and floods "the mines are sometimes moved and people step on them." She added: "Just the families are told. It doesn't get reported on the TV news."
Visitors to Panmunjom, the site of the armistice which ended the 1950-1953 Korean War, are driven through the minefield along a tarmacadam road lined with red warning triangles hanging from strands of wire. They are taken to an observation theatre with terraces of plastic seats and powerful coin-operated binoculars facing a picture window overlooking the four-mile-wide no man's land.
About 75,000 tourists come every year to inspect the hilly terrain made familiar by the television serial MASH with its camouflaged bunkers, tanks, artillery, missile silos and old wartime minefields. They can also descend 73 metres through a damp, sloping shaft and walk along part of the "Third Tunnel", the biggest of several dug through bedrock by the North Koreans during the 1970s in a vain attempt to avoid the minefields and mount a surprise attack.
The award of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and its American co-ordinator Jody Williams, and the signing this month by 90 countries of a convention banning the use, stockpiling, production and transfer of anti-personnel devices, has put the US military on the defensive over its refusal to decommission the Korean minefield.
The Pentagon, which has deployed 37,000 US troops along the DMZ, also wants to maintain its stocks of "scatterable" smart mines at the last Cold War frontier. These recently developed devices that are the size of hockey pucks can be fired from mobile artillery guns at advancing troops and programmed to self-destruct after a given time.
"Landmines save lives because, as part of our physical barrier array, they constitute a very tough nut for any enemy commander to crack," said a spokesman for US Forces, who claimed the mines were carefully documented and managed. He said that if anti-personnel mines were removed, infiltrators could disable anti-tank mines, which are not banned under the convention.
A US army computerised war game known as Janus predicted that tens of thousands of additional allied casualties would occur without landmines if the North invaded. But it has been criticised by Lieut Gen James Hollingsworth, who said it used faulty data and ignored the possibility that North Korea's disciplined troops would be willing to move through minefields taking casualties. "If we are relying on these weapons to defend the Korean peninsula we are in big trouble," he said.
Opposition groups in South Korea are also beginning to speak out against the mines. Some children were among the civilian victims, according to the Korean MP Mr Chong Tong-yong, who claims that mines were swept south of the Military Control Zone during a flood last year.
The Korea Campaign to Ban Landmines, comprising 15 activist groups, was started in Seoul last month with the goal of turning the DMZ into a "peace zone" without mines. Two men who each lost a leg in mine explosions attended their news conference.
The knowledge that anti-personnel devices capable of tearing off human limbs lie in the rough is enough to make any golfer nervous when teeing up near the DMZ behind the sign saying "Welcome to the World's Most Dangerous Golf Course". Actually the title is a misnomer. Panmunjom golf course consists of just one single, 192-yard, par-three hole. Nothing to die for.