BUSAN, SOUTH KOREA — Your nation is technically at war with North Korea, among the most hostile countries on Earth. It has long threatened to turn your homeland into "rubble" and is making noises about launching a long-range ballistic test missile any day now.
What do you think?
Many South Koreans will tell you plainly: baloney.
"Every day I read the news about North Korea's latest threat, to launch this or bomb that -- then I yawn and turn the page," said Kim Myung-gyu, who owns a restaurant in this southern resort city. "This isn't new behavior. It just doesn't scare me anymore."
Just down the street, Ko Yeong-sil took a break from his restaurant job to grab a cup of coffee. When asked about the looming North Korean missile launch, he laughed.
"It's no big deal," Ko said. "The media tries to scare us with stories about what North Korea could do. But it's not working."
He sipped his coffee. "Pyongyang is babbling, just like always."
Arriving in Tokyo this week on her first trip abroad as secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton was greeted with a warning from North Korea: Officials could test-launch a Taepodong 2 missile that analysts say has enough range to reach the western United States.
"One will come to know later what will be launched," said a statement from the North's state-run Korean Central News Agency.
U.S. officials say they have reason to take the threat seriously -- with some saying the test is a way for North Korea to grab the attention of the Obama administration's developing foreign policy plan.
The Korean peninsula has technically been at war since the end of the Korean War in 1953. The world's most heavily guarded border along the 38th parallel between the North and South sits only 30 or so miles north of South Korea's capital, Seoul.
But after 50 years of chest-thumping and bluster, if the North was going to make any kind of serious military move, it surely would have done it by now, many South Koreans say. They don't seem worried that the North Korean government has been angered by a cutoff of cash and aid during the last year by a new, more conservative government in South Korea.
A 2008 survey of 1,000 residents by the Korea Institute for National Unification showed that 34% of those polled believed a North Korean attack was likely and 4% said it was "very possible." Nearly 60% of those polled believed that such an attack was "unlikely" or "less likely."
