Explosions echoing from North Korea sound like war but in reality are the North Koreans saying, “No way are we going to have a thing to do with the South Koreans below the line separating the two Koreas.”

The North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, “set forth the direction of immediate military action” and “the exercise of the right to self-defense,” said Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency. He uttered not a word, however, about his order to destroy roads and rail lines to the South. The roads have not seen traffic for years, and the rail lines, built by Hyundai, were never used except for test runs since their opening in 2007.

None of which means the prospects for renewing North-South ties — maybe even getting to the mystical stage of reunification — are dead, in the view of a retired army colonel, David Maxwell, who served five tours with special forces in South Korea.

“We stand at a historical inflection point, with North Korea actively extinguishing the possibility of peaceful unification,” Colonel Maxwell tells the Sun. “The stakes are too high to remain passive or assume the status quo will hold.”

In the face of the widespread view that it’s pointless to dream of the North giving up its nuclear program, much less reuniting with the South, Colonel Maxwell, who is vice president of the Center for Asia-Pacific Strategy at Washington, believes a “doctrine” for reunification as propounded by President Yoon of South Korea might bear fruit despite influencers shrugging it off.

South Korea “is actually doing for the first time work on real plans,” Colonel Maxwell says in an email, pointedly writing “north” rather than “North” Korea to emphasize the view that Korea is all one country. “This is not old-fashioned ‘regime change.’ This is about creating conditions for change inside north Korea by the Korean people in the north.”

Given the total dictatorship imposed by the Kim dynasty, though, how can conditions change other than by some cataclysmic explosion, a second Korean War or internal revolt in the North?

“This is about the Korean people in the north creating change internally with us helping and empowering them,” says Colonel Maxwell. That might appear easier said than done, but “It is not difficult to do if we have the political will,” he insists. “There are so many technical means to get information in” by “empowering and using them correctly.”

Colonel Maxwell, who puts out his news and views every day for a broad audience, talked to the Sun after the North Koreans began blowing up crucial links above the eastern and western ends of the DMZ that stretches 150 miles across the Korean peninsula.

South Korea responded by firing shots on its side of the demarcation line in the middle of the DMZ “as a warning against acts that likely violate the armistice agreement,” said the South’s Yonhap News, reporting detonations ten meters above the line — within the demilitarized zone that’s separated the two Koreas since the signing of the armistice in July 1953.

North Korea was careful, though, not to unduly alarm the South Koreans and Americans south of the line. The North’s military had already announced its plan to “completely separate North Korea’s territory from South Korea,” Yonhap noted, letting the American military know in advance to “prevent any misjudgment and accidental conflict.”

The American and United Nations commands had no comment, but Colonel Maxwell  did not see destruction of links once seen as vital for normalizing North-South relations as reason for despair. “Please try to understand the nature, objectives, and strategy of the Kim family regime,” he urged. “Once you do that you can then know how to deal with it.”