hankyoreh

South Korea will conduct a trial run of an unmanned surveillance system this year to guard the demilitarized zone (DMZ) dividing the two Koreas, the country's military procurement agency said Friday.

The Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA) signed a deal with the Samsung-affiliated security company S1 to install the system on an unidentified Army division-controlled wire fence on the southern side of the heavily fortified DMZ.

"The system will be established from June until August, and we will report the test results to the National Assembly in October," said Yoon Seong-deok, chief of the GOP project team at the DAPA.

If the system proves to be useful, the government will seek to apply the system to the entire four-kilometer-wide DMZ, which stretches for 248 kilometers from east to west, he told reporters.

In the designated area, the barbed-wire fence will be wrapped with a greenish optical web equipped with a camera designed to detect moving objects as far as 2 kilometers away at daytime and 400 meters away at nighttime.

The government plans to spend 4.1 billion won (US$4 million) for the test run, and the ultimate adoption of the system will cost an estimated 905.6 billion won by 2011, Yoon added. But opponents of the project say the surveillance system can have a negative effect on the relationship between South and North Korea, whose relations have been warming since the historic summit of their leaders in June 2000.

South Korea is still technically in a state of war with North Korea since the Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. North Korea has more than one million troops arrayed along its border with South Korea. Seoul, June 23 (Yonhap News)