so that's the ultimate goal that everyone says they want,

but no one thinks they're very close to that.

(delicate music)

South Korea is so much wealthier, more powerful,

it's just a totally different type of country

than North Korea now that it's hard to imagine them

unifying in any sort of easy way.

Society's have grown so far apart, so I think that the

South Koreans would see North Korea as a burden,

they'd have to invest an enormous amount of money

to rebuild North Korea, reeducate,

or at least deal with the costs of unification.

We have a country essentially living in a dark period

where they have very little internet access.

It's not like any other country in the world;

North Korea is one of the most isolated, closed off,

totalitarian societies in the world.

South Korea, on the flip side, is one of the most open,

free, technologically savvy societies in the world.

So, to combine those seems almost unbelievable,

especially the younger generations

in both countries have really no memory

of any connection between the two sides.

There's not a huge amount of popular support

in South Korea for unification.

People talk about it as it's something that's great,

but they I think recognize how different the countries are

and how unbelievably costly and difficult

an actual unification would be.

The main obstacles, I think, are North Korea's difficult

relations with all the other countries besides South Korea,

and that includes the United States and China.

The real sticking point is that technically

the United States and North Korea are still

in an armed conflict, meaning that the end of the Korean War

it was just a ceasefire, they never really

formally resolved all the issues from that war.

And so that's why US troops are still in South Korea,

and that's why they're all pretty much

on armed alert, they could fight at any time.

Resolving those sort of international complications

is really the bigger obstacle, much less getting

to the question of what the Koreas want from each other.

Unification is way down the road,

so that's the ultimate goal that everyone says they want,

but no one thinks they're very close to that.

I think what they would want is de-escalation.

Maybe everyone agrees to take down their nukes.

The US is ready- removed all nuclear weapons

from South Korea and the idea North Koreans

would shut down their nuclear program.

And then, some sort of peace agreement with the

United States, and then everyone starts pulling back

their troops from the demilitarized zone,

so that not everyone's ready to shoot at a moment's notice.

Only at that point can they really talk

about some sort of unification.

I think regular exchanges where they start

opening up travel between North Korea and South Korea.

They've done some cooperative projects

where they have these sort of peace zones

where they- South Koreans build stuff

and North Koreans and South Koreans can

sort of work together in some small zones.

I think that's what we can imagine happening

after the nuclear crisis is solved.

Unification is just something-

it seems unlikely that could happen anytime in the near

future unless North Korea just collapses for some reason.

We don't have a lot of precedence for this,

the best example for us in recent history

is the unification of West Germany

and East Germany in the early 90's.

In that situation essentially East Germany was,

basically, swallowed up by West Germany

and I think that would be pretty simple.

Reason why that doesn't seem likely to happen though

is because China has a strong interest in maintaining

a separate country in North Korea

that's not just swallowed up by South Korea.

And that's one of the biggest differences

between East Germany and West Germany

and North Korea and South Korea.

The Russians, or the Soviet Union, no longer cared

whether East Germany became part of West Germany,

but the Chinese still care and they can make a big

difference in preserving North Korea as a separate country.

(delicate music)