Feigning as much detachment as I could, I once asked a western diplomat over lunch what arrangements various countries had for evacuating their citizens in the event of a conflict on the Korean peninsula.

I shouldn’t worry about it, they said. The firepower of the respective adversaries is so great, and the distances between them so small, that it — and I — would all be over before I even knew it had begun.

So when I attended a seminar hosted by the Korea Risk Group consultancy late last year on how businesses and governments might prepare for various crisis contingencies up to and including war, I was oddly comforted to learn that my chances of survival are in fact slightly better than zero.