The antitank barricades that dot the landscape in border towns near DMZ

An antitank barricade known as “dragon’s teeth” near Jiyeong Bridge, which crosses Gongneung Stream in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province.

Local governments demand removal of structures designed for war

The most prominent military structures on the border region in Gyeonggi Province are the barbed-wire fences along the Han River and the antitank structures built along the roads and waterways. After the experience of being left defenseless against People’s Army forces with Soviet-made T-34 tanks in the early stages of the Korean War in 1950, the South Korean military went to work after the armistice busily setting up antitank barricades and dragon’s teeth” on roads and rivers. With the likelihood of total war shrinking since the 2000s, local governments are now demanding that the dragon’s teeth and other antitank structures be removed.

The zenith of antitank construction came when the new city of Ilsan was built in the early 1990s. During a July 1994 extraordinary session of the National Assembly, then Minister of National Defense Lee Byung-tae infuriated Ilsan residents when he announced that the “new cities on the periphery of Greater Seoul will be used as barriers to block the southern advancement of North Korea in the event of an emergency.” That September, a memorandum of agreement on a military readiness plan for Ilsan New City was made public. Drafted on Aug. 31, 1990, between Army Chief of Staff Lee Jin-sam and Korea Land Development Corporation (KLDC) President Lee Sang-hee, the document includes plans for narrowing south-north roads and broadening east-west ones, arranging apartments and other structures horizontally from east to west to suit military operations, and using easily dismantled plywood for walls between units to allow strongholds to be established in an emergency situation. Guidelines for a “stronghold establishment design concept” for Ilsan sent to the KLDC president by the Army’s Jayu Motorway project team called for positioning at least 60% of all apartments in a horizontal direction and allowing stronghold adaptation for athletic fields, parks, and even children’s playgrounds.

An antitank barricade along Unification Road in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province

In contrast with the South’s traumatizing experience with tanks, the North had seen its entire territory obliterated in attacks by US fighter aircraft, and its response strategy was to build large-scale defense positions underground.

After building large tunnels around the Armistice Line during the war, North Korea began pursuing underground positioning of military facilities in earnest with Kim Il-sung’s 1962 strategy of “fortifying the entire national territory.” Four North Korean tunnels discovered south of the Military Demarcation Line (MDL) between 1974 and 1990 were part of this. The tunnels’ only entrances are on the North Korean side, but South Korean authorities fashioned “indirect shafts” dug to locate the tunnels into a sight for visiting tourists. Symbols of the anti-communist spirit, the tunnels also served as a pretext for fortifying the area around the MDL.

In a paper titled “A Study of the Development of Tunnels into ‘Cold War Spectacles’ during the 1970s,” Jeon Won-geun, a visiting researcher at the Seoul National University Institute for Social Development and Policy Research, wrote, “As an end to the national division system and Cold War is sought, Cold War-era spectacles like the tunnels will need to be reconfigured in different ways.”

“As we begin to question the politics of security and the vicious cycle of fear, the tunnels will emerge as an open spectacle within a more diverse process of meaning,” Jeon wrote.

By Park Kyung-man, North Gyeonggi correspondent

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