For nearly six decades, South Korea's (ROK) approach to security has focused on sustaining the status quo: Maintaining deterrence and a robust defence posture in order to prevent another major conflict on the Korean Peninsula.

On February 12, 2013, North Korea carried out its third nuclear test in the run-up to the inauguration of a new administration – my own – in the South. Around that time, the Presidential Transition Committee adopted the “Trust-Building Process on the Korean Peninsula” as a key policy of the new administration. Though the North’s nuclear test created pressure to revise the trust-building process, I made it clear that I would stay the course.

On Oct. 24, 1995, as a man now known as Kim Dong-sik hiked up a rain-slick mountain road in Buyeo, about 95 miles south of Seoul, he could not shake off a foreboding. He and another North Korean agent had sneaked into South Korea by boat 52 days earlier on a mission to bring home a Communist spy who had been working in the South for 15 years.