Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You can set your phone to filter these out, but then you'll also miss the notification about North Korea commencing artillery bombardment. Considering most of SK's population is in Seoul, and Seoul is within range of NK artillery, wouldn't most people be aware before the notification came anyways?
"Aware" is definitely one choice of word. The expectation in Seoul is that if the day ever does come, you will be dead before you make it out of the office building you work in. They run evacuation drills anyway, because of course they do.
>"To be shelled by mass artillery and mortars is absolutely terrifying, but to be shelled in the open is terror compounded beyond the belief of anyone who hasn't experienced it."
It is estimated that Seoul would have 2-4 minutes of warning of an NK barrage due to the artillery shell flight time. Having 2 to 4 minutes to get anywhere other than an open area is valuable.
A NK artillery barrage on Seoul would be horrific and devastating but it wouldn't kill everyone.
> One early examination of the problem, by Bruce Bennett of the RAND Corporation, finds that circa 1995 the KPA may have been capable of firing as many as 200,000 long-range rounds into South Korea on the first day of a conflict—and that even a short 3-to-5-minute artillery barrage into the Seoul metro area could cause as many as 7,500 civilian casualties—with the total fatalities rising much higher if North Korea continued the attack. An analysis from 2012 by Roger Cavazos finds that a North Korean artillery attack on Seoul could produce around 30,000 fatalities. And a recent study by researchers at RAND finds that an hour-long artillery barrage on Seoul would produce between 87,600 and 130,000 casualties, of which between 6,620 and 10,680 would be fatalities—with many more fatalities to come if the artillery bombardment continued. [0]
[0] https://tnsr.org/2025/06/lost-seoul-assessing-pyongyangs-oth...