A Landmine Hell

The Korean Peninsula has one of the highest mine densities in the world, comparable to other former war zones like Cambodia, Afghanistan and Angola.

Estimates have suggested that the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) contains between 800,000 and one million landmines, many dating back to the Korean War. And that was before October 2026, when the South Korean military accused North Korea of having laid an additional 960,000 mines on its side of the DMZ since 2024 as part of its efforts to fortify its border amid rising tensions. Neither North Korea nor South Korea knows exactly how many mines they have laid or where they are located. There are also approximately one million pieces of unexploded ordnance in the area.

The Arrowhead Hill, in Cheorwon, is the sector with the highest density: a mind-boggling 2.3 mines per square meter.

Among the dangerous devices found in the border area is the hard to detect, U.S. designed M14, nicknamed “the toe popper”, a palm-sized, plastic-cased blast mine. As most anti-personnel mines used around the world, it is designed not to kill, but to maim by tearing off a foot when stepped on. The reasoning is simple: a seriously wounded soldier, who must be evacuated and treated, delays the enemy more than a dead soldier who can be left behind.

There is also the theatrical and terrifying M16: a bounding fragmentation mine that leaps to roughly knee height when triggered by pressure on the prongs or a tripwire before bursting, spraying schrapnel in all directions to produce multiple casualties within 30 meters.

The most famous North Korean mine is the notorious ATM-74, a simple wooden box filled with explosives and a copy of of the Soviet TMD-B produced during World War II. The “wooden box mine,” is also hard to detect and detonates when someone steps on the lid. Primitive and extremely cheap, this device is nonetheless extraordinarily dangerous. More recent versions replace the wooden box with a brown plastic or resin box, which is even harder for detectors to pick up.

Many anti-personnel and anti-tank mines in the border are direct remnants of the Korean War. But tens of thousands of land mines were also planted in the DMZ by both Koreas and the United States from around 1962 to prevent infiltrations.

North and South Korea are among the few countries that have not joined the 1997 Ottawa Convention on the prohibition of anti-personnel mines and on their destruction. This treaty requires signatories to clear their territory of all anti-personnel mines within ten years of ratification, an impossible task on the Korean peninsula: It is estimated that if it began now, the mine clearance effort for South Korea would take nearly 500 years to complete. As for the United States, which has also not ratified the Ottawa Treaty, its policy since 2022 prohibits the use of anti-personnel mines anywhere in the world, except in the Korean Peninsula.

Despite pockets of demining, like the Joint Security Area, the vast majority of minefields in Korea remain intact in rugged terrain. According to the Mine Action Review research institute, there were 1,308 such areas in 2021, covering a total area of 128 square kilometers, or nearly one and a half times the size of Manhattan.

In addition to the minefields near the border, there are others set up in the rear to protect South Korea’s military bases, anti-aircraft gun positions, missile sites and radar stations. The 1968 Blue House Raid, during which a North Korean commando unit nearly stormed the presidential palace in Seoul, was followed by a flurry of mine-laying around strategic facilities across the country. Other measures of this kind were taken out of fear of North Korean raids ahead of the 1988 Seoul Olympics.

In a 2001 nationwide survey of minefields outside the frontier zone, the Korea Campaign to Ban Landmines (KCBL) and Green Korea United recorded 36 such sites across the country, including one inside Seoul at Umyeonsan, a vast mountain park in the Seocho District, at the summit of which is a South Korean Air Force battery. In 1991, a man who was gathering herbs in the woods stepped on a mine and lost his right foot there. It was the last recorded mine accident in the capital.

The South Korean Ministry of National Defense declared all the rear-area minefields militarily obsolete in 2001, and began clearing them. But of the thousand M14s laid in Umyeonsan, twelve were never found. Even today, some sections of this city park remain off-limits due to the ongoing danger. To make the problem even more complicated, catastrophic landslides caused by a typhoon in 2011 are believed to have swept some of the Umyeonsan mines away to unknown locations.

Minefields in South Korea are classified into two categories: “planned minefields”, which are laid out in an orderly manner and appear on maps, and “unconfirmed minefields”, where mines have supposedly been buried (mostly during the Korean War) but their location has not been clearly identified. Outside the DMZ, both categories are clearly marked and fenced, but that does not mean the danger has been completely eliminated.

An M14 mine is only 56 mm in diameter and, made mainly of plastic, weighs less than 100 grams. Floods or landslides can easily bring them back to the surface and carry them outside the identified minefields, a phenomenon known as mine migration.

In addition, mines planted in the DMZ or on the coasts sometimes wash up on beaches and riverbanks in the South, especially during the summer monsoon season. North Korean “wooden box mines” and other models, made of plastic and shaped like a leaf, float when carried away by water. It is common for rivers coming from the north, such as the Imjin or the Hantan, to have their banks closed off by the authorities because of the risk.

More serious still, North Korea has at times been accused by Seoul of deliberately laying mines south of the Military Demarcation Line (MDL, see the glossary for an explanation of all technical terms). This was the case on August 4, 2015, when several mine explosions in the DMZ near Yeoncheon severely wounded two South Korean noncommissioned officers during a routine patrol. One lost both legs, the other one leg. The incident was followed a few days later by an artillery duel in the DMZ. Three days of marathon negotiations in the Joint Security Area brought the escalation to an end.

On September 21, 2026, three South Korean soldiers were severely wounded (one had an ankle torn off) in the same sector by the explosion of two mines during a routine patrol about ten meters south of the MDL. The United Nations Command investigation determined that they were North Korean wooden box mines laid approximately a year before, and denounced a violation of the armistice. It remains unclear whether the mines were deliberately planted in the South, or whether the North Korean soldiers who laid them believed they were on their own territory in an area where the MDL’s course is unclear. Pyongyang denied all responsibility and claimed the incident had been staged by Seoul.

Official statistics on landmine casualties do not exist, but activists estimate that mines have killed or injured around 1,000 civilians and between 2,000 and 3,000 military in the country since 1953.