The good, the bad, and the ugly in Korea come together at a small series of sheds built here in the 1950s. Known as the "joint security area," and located in a mine-laden rural landscape, it is where North and South Korean forces stand virtually eyeball to eyeball.

The drab sheds, known as T-1, T-2, and T-3, are the heart of Panmunjom - a tiny patch of heavily fortified neutrality on a 155-mile armistice line that separates the Koreas. As the only place where the two sides have day-to-day contact, the area is a bellwether for 50-year-old tensions and a current nuclear crisis.

From their respective sides of the sheds, where talks take place weekly now, guards from the North - older men, hardened elites - leer at younger men from the South [Republic of Korea] who stand with fists clenched, bodies arched forward, in an aggressive posture known as "ROK-ready."

Panmunjom is in no small sense a theater of perceptions, say US military officials here. Both sides watch each other 24 hours a day through binoculars and monitoring cameras, and neither side strays from an elaborate system of behavioral rules. Joint US-ROK troops sit in trucks with the keys in the ignition, ready for action. They say the soldiers from the North provoke them by making slitting motions across their throats. "They really hate us, and they want us to feel that," says Capt. Brian Davis, one of 250 handpicked US soldiers at Camp Bonifas, located nearby.

Because Panmunjom is the "frontline" between the two sides, US strategists say that any serious attack or move by the North would be reflected here. Cameras on the ROK side are monitored on site, at Camp Bonifas, and at central operations in Seoul, to check for such changes. When a North Korean MiG jet crossed the DMZ two weeks ago, one in a series of escalating provocations by North leader Kim Jong Il, it sparked a momentary crisis: Just at that moment, one member of a North Korean team of weed clearers stepped over the armistice line, a major violation. "We were alarmed at first," says Captain Davis, who often sits in the weekly armistice talks. "But we decided it was just a case of inconsequential weed pulling."

The psychological battles here are constant. At an officers meeting in T-3 recently, the North brass refused to sit. They claimed the chairs on their side of the table were inferior. The US officers should not sit until the situation was rectified, they said. The US commander disagreed. So the US sat and the North Koreans continued to stand, refusing to talk. "It got a little tense in there, and we weren't sure where this was going," Davis says. "Finally I think we got them some different chairs."

The incident bespeaks a surreal quality to the entire DMZ in Korea, a two-mile-wide strip of no-man's land. The road here from Seoul, South Korea's capital, winds along the Han River as it spreads into a coastal estuary ringed with craggy hills. The road is lined with barbed wire leading from a high-tech metropolis to the border of a Third-World Stalinist state with nuclear capability. The barbed wire was added after Northern commandos in the mid-90s infiltrated from the river.

To many who travel and live here, the DMZ seems inexplicably strange - slightly creepy, scenically beautiful, a place where Rip Van Winkle could wake up and find the cold war still going strong. If anything, this is more true in recent weeks. With Mr. Kim threatening to end the 50-year-old Korean armistice and restart nuclear facilities, the intercept on March 1 of a US spy plane, and rocket tests, there's a feeling of being jolted into a standoff that no one on the South side wants.

US-South Korean forces here are known as the "trip wire" against a North attack. But given a million-man North Korean Army, soldiers here call themselves "a speed bump." Most US forces are now pulled back from the frontlines so as not to be provocative. Those here say the experience is "intense," according to one GI.

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