In the past I’ve had the opportunity to visit DMZ from the North Korean side , and on a recent trip to South Korea I decided to head up again to see it from the South. With security tensions between the two Korean nations at its highest point in years during my visit, I wanted to get a look at the situation for myself.

The Korean Demilitarized Zone is, as the name implies, a strip of land between North and South Korea that acts as a buffer between the two countries. The strip, which runs along the 38th parallel and is 250 km long and 4 km wide, cuts the two countries nearly cleanly in half. It was created in 1953 as part of the Korean Armistice Agreement, which ended the Korean War. Due to the well-publicized remaining tensions between the two Koreas, the DMZ is today the most heavily-defended national border in the world.

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