To begin to understand the stakes underpinning North Korea's transition of power in communism's only dynasty, you only need to drive less than an hour from central Seoul. Here, as you drive through plains of mudflats and reeds, you will notice fortifications jutting out of the wilderness, or maybe a column of camouflaged soldiers stalking through the scrub.
As you arrive at the truce village of Panmunjom - a no-man's-land administered on the South Korean side by United Nations forces - the paranoid realities of the world's last cold war border are even more apparent. North Korean soldiers peer through large binoculars just metres away from their South Korean enemies, who stand, shoulders hunched and fists clenched, in a taekwondo fighting stance. The two sides, of course, are still technically at war, with the hostilities of the 1950-1953 Korean war having ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.
For all the talk of hot issues such as the South China Sea or the India-China border, military strategists have long known there is no more dangerous place in the region.
A giant North Korean flag - reportedly the biggest in the world - ripples above a nearby village. Less visible are an estimated 70,000 artillery pieces the North has hidden in bunkers and tunnels on its side of what is the most heavily fortified border on earth. Even without the nuclear weapons it is developing, or its missiles, Pyongyang could rain thousands of artillery shells on Seoul.
Even a small spike in tensions and uncertainty as Kim Jong-un - young, untested and largely unknown - assumes the mantle of his father and grandfather would be enough to send currents of fear far beyond Seoul.
Last year's fatal torpedoing of a South Korean warship - denied by Pyongyang - and the artillery attack on the border island of Yongpyeong only underscore the dangerous sensitivities of transition in Pyongyang.