Essence of explosions

By Nam Sang-so

On June 16, North Korea blew up the South-North joint liaison office in the North's border town of Kaesong. South Korea in a response statement warned it would “respond strongly if the North continues to worsen the situation.” The mild statement irritated many South Koreans who are demanding retaliation in kind. It was excessive for the North to create such a huge scene just to demolish a single building unless it was an act of propaganda. Then on the night of Oct. 10, the North displayed a massive new missile believed to be capable of targeting the other side of the Earth with nuclear warheads.

In the spring of 1957, I found my first job with a construction company from Boise, Idaho, named Morrison-Knudson, at the Hwacheon dam reconstruction project. The dam site had been north of the 38th parallel of Gangwon Province before the war. It's now on the south side of the DMZ. I was assigned as the chief of the drilling and dynamite department, responsible for blasting old dam concrete.

In the 1950-53 Korean War, North Korean and the U.N. forces had battled fiercely to take the dam. The U.S. Navy mobilized Corsair fighters and Douglas Sky-Raiders and dropped aerial torpedoes on the dam to spoil the North's flooding tactics against the South including the city of Seoul.

The water gates and the surface of the dam were greatly damaged. It was my job to measure the proper amount of dynamite be inserted in each drilled hole to blast out the loose concrete. And then I pushed down the T-handle of the blast machine which produces electric current to trigger a main explosive charge. It was a fun, yet delicate job to accurately measure the amount of dynamite in each hole to make sure that it wouldn't damage the main structures of the dam which were to be saved and covered later by new concrete.

There are many phenomena of explosions in nature. First of all, the universe was said to be created by the Big Bang. An explosion is a rapid increase in volume and release of energy in an extreme manner, usually generating high temperatures. The Athenian temple of the Parthenon was once used temporarily as a place to store gunpowder. In 1687 it was blown up when negligent management cause an explosion. Tourists today see the beautiful ancient building without its roof.

Explosives are not only for violence but are also one of the most important tools in civil engineering work. Without dynamite, the Suez and Panama canals couldn't have been dug out.

As explosives won't disappear, we are going to see a lot more explosions mostly through acts of war, with ensuing damage to infrastructure and loss of human life. Although it may sound far-fetched a comparison, the universe itself is the essence of the explosions. And explosions are the essence of war and demolition. Peace in the world would depend on how we humans could tame the power of explosives.

The writer (

sangsonam@gmail.com

) is a Korean War veteran.