Of the many major accidents taking place in North Korea that are unknown to the outside world, the Kanggye Munitions Plant explosion is carved among North Koreans as the worst one on record. The explosion in Jagang province in early winter 1990 was said to have claimed about 1,300 lives, slightly over 1,000 on the ground and some 300 underground. Though camouflaged as a small tractor-manufacturing firm, the munitions plant was the largest missile plant in the North and the accident was caused by the carelessness of military guards.

"People originally thought the series of explosions at the weapons plant as the work of espionage agents from South Korea and the United States," recalled Kim Ki-won (alias), a Kanggye native who fled to the South. "But they soon learned about the true nature of the incident from those who managed to escape from it." According to witnesses who defected to the South, at the time a number of missiles and thousands of multiple rocket launcher shells, produced over a month for export to the Middle East including Iran, were piled up in the open air outside the plant. The guards made a fire to warm themselves in the cold weather and the flames sputtered onto oily paper covering a missile and then wooden missile cases, leading to a major fire and a series of shell explosions.

A young lady who was with the guards rushed to a fire station to report the fire, while the guards, reinforced by policemen, desperately tried to stop the fire from extending to the underground facilities. The entrance was comprised of two thick steel doors, but they failed to shut the first one because its automatic closing mechanism was out of order. However they somehow managed to preventing the fire from reaching the underground facilities by shutting the second one.

The fire and explosions rendered the factory like a battle scene as they swept away nearby houses. "The sky above Kanggye looked reddish," reminisced a North Korean defector who had lived in Huichon, 100km away from Kanggye. Windows of most houses in Kanggye city were blown out and shocked residents crowded the streets. Through the Third Broadcasting Station, whose cable radio sets are installed in all households, the authorities tried to calm the residents, telling them it was not a war, but an accident, thought this could hardly placate the horrified people effectively.

When the shut door to the underground facilities was opened, the bodies of about 300 engineers and workers were found; women gathered in the center and men surrounding them; many of them leaving behind their dying wishes on pieces of paper. With the entrance tightly closed, they had suffocated to death in addition to the slightly more than 1,000 people killed in the surface structures from the explosions and fire.

All the workers who died underground were made heroes posthumously, and the missile plant was moved elsewhere. The authorities took all possible measures to cover up the incident, but to no avail in view of its enormous scale and extraordinarily high death toll. This writer, who had then been residing in Hamhung, South Hamgyong province, also heard of it soon thereafter.

(Kang Chol-hwan, kch@chosun.com )