Peace Dam

Just as the Demilitarized Zone is in fact the most militarized zone in the world, the story of the Peace Dam is anything but peaceful.

This gigantic concrete wall blocking the course of the Bukhan river, lost in the Taebaek mountain range less than 12 kilometers from the North Korean border, cost 400 billion won, the equivalent of 290 million US dollars. But it has no holding reservoir, and produces no electricity.

Its sole purpose is to contain a hypothetical “water bomb”: a catastrophic flood unleashed upstream by North Korea to annihilate the metropolis of Seoul, some 200 kilometers downstream.

The psychosis was launched in 1986 by South Korean military dictator Chun Doo-hwan, faced with a powerful wave of internal protest, to divert attention and unite the country against the communist arch enemy two years before the Seoul Summer Olympic Games.

That year, North Korea mobilized approximately 150,000 troops and laborers to build the Imnam Dam, a massive hydroelectric project on the upper Bukhan River, 24 kilometers north of the border.

North Korea never made any secret of why it built the dam. The Bukhan River (Bukhangang, in Korean) flows southwards and is a tributary of the Han River, that runs through Seoul before emptying in the Yellow Sea. The Imnam Dam intercepts the flow before it crosses the border and diverts it eastward through a system of tunnels and canals toward a hydroelectric power station on North Korea’s east coast. The water that once nourished the capitalist puppets of the South is now being used by North Korean industry.

On October 30, 1986, South Korea’s Minister of Construction called a press conference. The North Koreans, he announced, were secretly building a dam of catastrophic dimensions with a planned reservoir capacity of 20 billion cubic meters of water. If this dam were ever blown up, the resulting flood would obliterate Seoul.

The announcement was timed with precision. The following day, October 31, government forces suppressed the occupation of Konkuk University by pro-democracy students, arresting over 1,500 people. South Korea was in the grip of one of the most powerful waves of popular opposition its military dictatorship had ever faced.

The man behind the announcement was Chun Doo-hwan, who had seized power in December 1979 in a coup staged in the wake of President Park Chung-hee’s assassination. Six months later, in May 1980, his government declared martial law across the country and sent special forces units into the city of Gwangju to crush an uprising. Hundreds of civilians were killed. Tens of thousands were imprisoned. By 1986, with the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games approaching and a democracy movement openly demanding a new constitution and direct presidential elections, Chun’s regime was fighting for its survival.

The threat of a “water nuclear bomb” was the answer.

South Korean television networks ran simulations all day. Computer-generated walls of muddy water swept through central Seoul. The 63 Building, the 249.6-metre skyscraper on Yeouido that was then the tallest structure in Asia and a symbol of South Korea’s economic miracle, was shown submerged to its mid-floors. Government-aligned academics appeared on screen to explain the math. The Minister of Defense produced a flood inundation map showing the precise depth of water at every major intersection in the capital. The scenario was presented not as a possibility, but as a plan. The North Koreans, it was claimed, intended to blow up the dam during the Olympics.

Amid this wave of anti-communist hysteria, a national fundraising campaign was launched immediately. Television stations broadcast marathon donation drives. Even schoolchildren were asked to donate a few hundred wons from their piggy banks, and those who failed to do so were publicly shamed by their teachers. Prisoners gave money. Korean communities abroad sent money.

The first phase of the Peace Dam was completed in time for the Olympics. But it soon became clear that North Korea did not have the nefarious intentions that Chun Doo-hwan had claimed.

The dam’s reservoir capacity was only 2.62 billion cubic meters of water, eight times less than the Chun administration’s estimate. As initially planned by Pyongyang, this water was being peacefully channelled towards a hydro-electric power station, and was never intended to drown the Olympic Games. In fact, the opposite happened. After the construction of the Imnam dam, the water inflow to the Han river decreased by 12%, causing shortages in the Seoul metropolitan area.

Work stopped in 1989, when the Peace Dam was already 80 metres high, when democracy had been restored in Seoul and when many South Koreans were feeling completely duped by Chun Doo-hwan. In 1993, an investigation by the Board of Audit and Inspection of Korea, an independent public institution whose mission is to control government accounts, concluded that Chun had grossly exaggerated the threat in an attempt to save his regime.

But the story doesn’t end there.

In early 2002, only months before South Korea was set to co-host the football World Cup, satellite images revealed something alarming: visible cracks running through the Imnam Dam. The North Korean structure had been hastily and poorly built. If it collapsed in a flood season, the resulting surge of water down the Bukhan River could be devastating.

The old psychosis resurfaced, this time with a legitimate engineering basis. To prevent further scares, work resumed on the Peace Dam. In September 2005, before construction was even finished, the scenario came dangerously close to reality: without warning, North Korea opened the Imnam Dam’s sluice gates and released a massive surge of water southward. The Peace Dam absorbed it.

The work was finally completed the following month, in October 2005, under President Roh Moo-hyun, a former human rights lawyer who had defended anti-government activists in the 1980s. The dam that a military dictator had sold to the nation as an anti-communist bulwark was completed under one of the very democracy advocates the dictator had sought to silence.

Chun Doo-hwan was later convicted of mutiny, corruption, and treason, and sentenced to death, before being pardoned in 1997. He died in Seoul in November 2021, aged 90, having never publicly acknowledged that the water bomb was a fabrication.

The Peace Dam is now 601 meters long and 125 meters high. More than 2,500 Empire State Buildings could fit in its virtual reservoir. It can hold the massive volume of 2.63 billion cubic meters of water, ten million more than the Imnam dam, and more than enough to contain a structural collapse on the North Korean side during a heavy rain season. It is the only infrastructure standing between that scenario and the downstream population.

Since 2018, the southern face of the dam has carried the world’s largest anamorphic painting. Commissioned by the Korea Water Resources Corporation and certified by the Guinness Book of Records at 4,775.7 square meters, the size of almost four Olympic swimming pools, the work was completed by a team of painters working nearly two months on the concrete surface. Titled “Door to Unification”, it creates the optical illusion of a stone archway opening through the dam toward North Korea, with the Bukhan River and the mountains visible beyond.

At the top of the dam hangs the World Peace Bell, cast from empty cartridges collected from Korean War battlefields and other conflict zones including the Middle East, Ethiopia, and Colombia. A short walk away, an outdoor gallery displays bronze casts of the outstretched hands of twelve Nobel Peace Prize laureates. Any visitor can shake hands here with the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Aung San Suu Kyi, Kim Dae-jung, Rigoberta Menchú, Barack Obama, and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Further down hangs the Silence Bell, made of wood, and permanently mute, representing two halves of a country that no longer speak to each other.

At the base of the dam, the International Peace Art Park displays decommissioned military equipment transformed into works of art: tanks painted in primary colors with windmills welded to their barrels, their gun turrets converted into children’s slides, their hulls chained to concrete pedestals. Another creative attempt to erase the K-Scar under a veneer of art and culture, at the foot of one of the most blatant symbols of Korea’s division.