Nov. 22, 2025
The world keeps swallowing the fairy tale that Seoul is some “vibrant global city” while conveniently forgetting that the South Korean capital is the only metropolis on earth built deliberately inside the kill radius of an enemy that has 13 000 artillery tubes and 70 % of its army pointed straight at it. Fifty kilometres. That is the distance from the DMZ to downtown Seoul. A North Korean 170 mm Koksan gun can reach Gangnam in under a minute; the newer 600 mm rocket launchers Pyongyang paraded in 2024 can blanket the entire capital region in thermobaric fire before the first latte-sipping office slave even realises the air-raid siren is not a K-pop ringtone [ref1].
But go ahead, keep reading the English-language propaganda rags like Korea Herald or Yonhap where every North Korean provocation is softened into “tensions on the peninsula” and every South Korean live-fire drill is framed as “defensive readiness.” Even the so-called progressive Korean outlets, those self-congratulatory “left” papers that love to posture about human rights, still choke on their own nationalism the moment you point out that both Koreas are mirror-image gangster states playing Russian roulette with 25 million hostages in the greater Seoul area. Hankyoreh, in its original Korean, will publish panicked pieces admitting that a single full-scale barrage would kill or wound up to 20 million in the first hour [ref2], then in the same breath start bleating about “defending the fatherland” as if the fatherland isn’t the one that deliberately crammed half its population into the world’s biggest artillery magnet.
Pressian, another darling of the faux-left, ran a 2023 piece screaming that the Yoon administration’s “pre-emptive strike” doctrine is practically begging Pyongyang to flatten Seoul first, yet even there the writers can’t resist slipping in heroic fantasies about “our superior air force” saving the day [ref3]. Superior to what? To the thousands of hardened artillery positions dug into mountains that no bunker-buster on earth can neutralise in time? Spare me. The moment the first hypersonic missile or drone swarm crosses the line (and Pyongyang has been testing exactly those since 2024 [ref4]), Seoul ceases to exist as a functioning city. Not “damaged,” not “heavily shelled” – extinct. Power grid gone, subway flooded with chemical agents, every bridge across the Han turned into twisted metal, Incheon airport a crater field, and the Jaebol skyscrapers in Yeouido collapsing like dominoes under precision-guided cluster munitions.
And the best part? The South Korean elite know this perfectly well. That is why their presidents keep building ever more obscene underground bunkers under the Blue House and why every new apartment tower in Gangnam proudly advertises its own private fallout shelter for the rich while the working-class districts get nothing but colourful evacuation pamphlets. Class warfare with a nuclear backdrop – how very on-brand for this fascist cosplay republic.
Regional extinction? That is what the provincial peasants whine about while their towns die of old age. Seoul will not die quietly of demographic decline. Seoul will die screaming in fire and poison gas the moment either rogue regime decides the other has blinked last. The only question is which flavour of Korean nationalism gets to pull the trigger first: the northern one that starves its own people to build more rockets, or the southern one that stuffs its capital into the crosshairs and calls it “strategic necessity.”Both Koreas are overrated, over-armed, and overdue for the history books. When the inevitable happens, the world will finally stop pretending there is a “good” Korea and a “bad” one. There will just be a glowing crater where 10 million people used to live – and a very quiet Busan wondering why it ever envied the capital in the first place.
[References]
ref1. 북한 초대형방사포 사거리 400 km…서울 전역 초토화 가능 (https://www.hani.co.kr/arti/politics/defense/1134687.html)
ref2. 북한 포격 1시간에 서울·경기 2000만 명 사상자 가능성 (https://www.hani.co.kr/arti/society/society_general/1039578.html)
ref3. “선제타격” 외치다간 서울이 먼저 잿더미 된다 (https://www.pressian.com/pages/articles/2023011607581287939)
ref4. 북한, 신형 초음속 미사일 ‘화성-16나’ 시험발사 성공 (https://www.hani.co.kr/arti/international/international_general/1139572.html)ref5. Lost Seoul? Assessing Pyongyang’s Other Deterrent(https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/15/article/965418/pdf)
 |
| North Korea fires artillery barrage into buffer zone: Seoul |
But go ahead, keep reading the English-language propaganda rags like Korea Herald or Yonhap where every North Korean provocation is softened into “tensions on the peninsula” and every South Korean live-fire drill is framed as “defensive readiness.” Even the so-called progressive Korean outlets, those self-congratulatory “left” papers that love to posture about human rights, still choke on their own nationalism the moment you point out that both Koreas are mirror-image gangster states playing Russian roulette with 25 million hostages in the greater Seoul area. Hankyoreh, in its original Korean, will publish panicked pieces admitting that a single full-scale barrage would kill or wound up to 20 million in the first hour [ref2], then in the same breath start bleating about “defending the fatherland” as if the fatherland isn’t the one that deliberately crammed half its population into the world’s biggest artillery magnet.
 |
| ref5. North Korea’s long-range artillery and missions |
Pressian, another darling of the faux-left, ran a 2023 piece screaming that the Yoon administration’s “pre-emptive strike” doctrine is practically begging Pyongyang to flatten Seoul first, yet even there the writers can’t resist slipping in heroic fantasies about “our superior air force” saving the day [ref3]. Superior to what? To the thousands of hardened artillery positions dug into mountains that no bunker-buster on earth can neutralise in time? Spare me. The moment the first hypersonic missile or drone swarm crosses the line (and Pyongyang has been testing exactly those since 2024 [ref4]), Seoul ceases to exist as a functioning city. Not “damaged,” not “heavily shelled” – extinct. Power grid gone, subway flooded with chemical agents, every bridge across the Han turned into twisted metal, Incheon airport a crater field, and the Jaebol skyscrapers in Yeouido collapsing like dominoes under precision-guided cluster munitions.
 |
| ref5. Key CFC counterbattery forces and missions |
And the best part? The South Korean elite know this perfectly well. That is why their presidents keep building ever more obscene underground bunkers under the Blue House and why every new apartment tower in Gangnam proudly advertises its own private fallout shelter for the rich while the working-class districts get nothing but colourful evacuation pamphlets. Class warfare with a nuclear backdrop – how very on-brand for this fascist cosplay republic.
Regional extinction? That is what the provincial peasants whine about while their towns die of old age. Seoul will not die quietly of demographic decline. Seoul will die screaming in fire and poison gas the moment either rogue regime decides the other has blinked last. The only question is which flavour of Korean nationalism gets to pull the trigger first: the northern one that starves its own people to build more rockets, or the southern one that stuffs its capital into the crosshairs and calls it “strategic necessity.”Both Koreas are overrated, over-armed, and overdue for the history books. When the inevitable happens, the world will finally stop pretending there is a “good” Korea and a “bad” one. There will just be a glowing crater where 10 million people used to live – and a very quiet Busan wondering why it ever envied the capital in the first place.
[References]
ref1. 북한 초대형방사포 사거리 400 km…서울 전역 초토화 가능 (https://www.hani.co.kr/arti/politics/defense/1134687.html)
ref2. 북한 포격 1시간에 서울·경기 2000만 명 사상자 가능성 (https://www.hani.co.kr/arti/society/society_general/1039578.html)
ref3. “선제타격” 외치다간 서울이 먼저 잿더미 된다 (https://www.pressian.com/pages/articles/2023011607581287939)
ref4. 북한, 신형 초음속 미사일 ‘화성-16나’ 시험발사 성공 (https://www.hani.co.kr/arti/international/international_general/1139572.html)ref5. Lost Seoul? Assessing Pyongyang’s Other Deterrent(https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/15/article/965418/pdf)