mines

June 26 (Asia Today) — South Korean defense experts, mine-clearance researchers and technology companies called for broader government, military and civilian cooperation to remove land mines and unexploded ordnance near the Demilitarized Zone, saying the weapons continue to threaten residents more than seven decades after the Korean War.

The Defense and Security Forum held its fourth roundtable Thursday at the Korea Mine Clearance Research Institute’s DMZ Peace Center in Haemaru Village in Paju, a restricted border area north of the Civilian Control Line.

The event, titled “Korean War DMZ Field Forum: Peace Grows When the Land Heals,” coincided with the 76th anniversary of the outbreak of the 1950-53 Korean War and South Korea’s month of remembrance for veterans.

Security specialists, field researchers, border residents and representatives of defense and information technology companies discussed mine removal, restoration of contaminated land and cooperation among government agencies, the military and private organizations.

The forum said areas contaminated by land mines, unexploded ordnance and other explosives in and near the DMZ and Civilian Control Zone are estimated to cover about 128 square kilometers, or 49 square miles.

It also cited estimates that about 2 million land mines remain buried across the Korean Peninsula’s heavily fortified border region.

The mines are not merely remnants of a past conflict, participants said. They continue to endanger people living in border communities and impede plans to preserve the DMZ as an internationally recognized area of peace and environmental conservation.

Residents in front-line communities face risks while farming, traveling and using land near suspected minefields.

Participants said previous mine-clearance accidents have also made local governments reluctant to pursue development, public infrastructure and community revitalization projects in some border regions, including areas around Cheorwon in Gangwon Province.

The discussion came after South Korea’s mine-action law took effect in February 2025.

The law establishes procedures for safely detecting and removing mines, unexploded ordnance, abandoned munitions and booby traps that are no longer considered militarily necessary.

It also allows qualified private corporations and organizations to conduct detection and removal work under government approval and safety requirements. The military previously handled most such operations.

Participants said cooperation with civilian specialists has become increasingly important as South Korea’s military faces declining troop numbers and difficulties retaining experienced mine-clearance personnel.

Baek Gun-ki, chairman of the Defense and Security Forum, said the country must remember the lessons of war while working toward a safer future.

“We must reflect on the tragic lessons of war and open the way toward a secure future for South Korea,” Baek said.

Seo Nam-yeol, president of the forum, moderated the discussion.

Kim Ki-ho, director of the Korea Mine Clearance Research Institute, presented an assessment of unconfirmed minefields and proposed directions for future clearance operations.

Forum director Kang Tae-jun outlined the South Korean Defense Ministry’s mine-action road map and discussed steps needed to expand cooperation between military and civilian organizations.

Representatives of South Korean defense and technology companies developing artificial intelligence-based detection systems and other advanced mine-clearance equipment also attended.

They discussed the technical limitations of equipment now used by the military and civilian organizations and agreed to pursue cooperation on developing and testing more advanced systems under field conditions.

Participants said mine action is evolving from a labor-intensive military task into a broader security and humanitarian undertaking that combines advanced technology, government policy and specialized civilian expertise.

Following the roundtable, participants visited a nearby area classified as an unconfirmed minefield.

The forum said the visit demonstrated that land mines are not solely a military issue but also affect public safety, land use, economic development and the daily lives of people in border communities.

“Land mines are like bullets lodged in the waist of the Korean Peninsula,” the forum said. “Only after those bullets are removed can vitality return to the peninsula and the lives of border residents fully recover.”

The group called on the central government, military, local governments and private mine-clearance organizations to develop a coordinated national response.

The forum said it plans to launch a nationwide campaign supporting mine clearance across the Korean Peninsula.

It also plans to strengthen South Korea’s mine-action capabilities and expand cooperation with international organizations and overseas specialists, including the United Nations Mine Action Service.

Organizers said South Korea could use its growing defense technology expertise to contribute to international humanitarian mine-clearance operations as well as domestic efforts.

A preliminary discussion featuring Kim and Seo was released online before the event. Video of the roundtable and field visit is expected to be published through the YouTube channel Cheongunmanma.

— Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI

© Asia Today. Unauthorized reproduction or redistribution prohibited.

Original Korean report: https://www.asiatoday.co.kr/kn/view.php?key=20260626010009324

Plucked from a previous life as a working actor, Richard Gadd experienced a disorienting whirlwind less than two years ago. “Baby Reindeer,” his painfully personal 2024 Netflix show, based on the sexual assault he survived, instantly opened the floodgates of fame for him.

“The show came out on Thursday, and by Sunday, I could barely walk anywhere without being recognized, without being stopped,” Gadd says while visiting The Times’ offices earlier this month. “That’s an adjustment because I always thought if anything like that ever happened, it would be a bit more of a gradual process. But it was overnight, so I didn’t have time to adjust.”

Now the winner of three Emmy Awards and a slew of other accolades for that series, which he starred in, wrote and served as showrunner, Gadd, 36, has already helmed a new emotionally ferocious show.

Probing the tropes of rigid masculinity, “Half Man,” premiering Thursday on HBO, chronicles the destructive bond between two men over several decades. Niall and Ruben — whose respective mothers are romantic partners — call themselves brothers but they couldn’t be more dissimilar.

Bullied at school, meek Niall (played by Mitchell Robertson in his youth and Jamie Bell in adulthood) lost his father as a young boy. He dreams of being a writer. Meanwhile, the insolent and hyper-confident Ruben (Stuart Campbell as a teen and Gadd as a grown-up) has been in trouble with the law from a tender age. Facing any conflict, he resorts to brutal violence. When Ruben takes Niall under his wing, the two become inseparable. But as the years and resentments pile on, their cancerous brotherhood threatens to obliterate them both.

“Half Man” follows the destructive bond between Ruben (Richard Gadd), left, and Niall (Jamie Bell) over several decades.

(Anne Binckebanck / HBO)

“Richard’s writing is really unique and really singular,” Bell says on a video call from England, where he’s currently shooting the “Peaky Blinders” sequel series and is sporting a shorter haircut. “He identifies that real gray area of humanity really well and he puts a voice to the most uncomfortable places that we go into or things that we think when we’re alone in the dark, when we think no one’s watching.”

Gadd wrote the first episode of what would become “Half Man” back in 2019, while he still was performing the live version of “Baby Reindeer,” which he turned into the series. At the time, he recalls, society at large was seriously engaging in conversations around toxic masculinity and sexual violence as the #MeToo movement gained strength.

“It wasn’t necessarily that I set out going, ‘Oh, I want to make a show about that,’” Gadd says. “It was more that something must have just drifted into my head thinking, ‘You take two men repressed in their current life, repressed in the modern world. And then you go all the way back to their childhood. You contextualize learned behavior; you contextualize trauma and things they learned that make them these repressed adults. And you bring a bit of context to, I suppose, difficult male behavior in the present.’”

As “Baby Reindeer” launched his career as a creator, Gadd put “Half Man” on ice for four years but couldn’t stop thinking about returning to it. “Even as I was coming to the end of ‘Baby Reindeer,’ I thought, ‘I’m really looking forward to getting back to that project,” he recalls. “The second ‘Baby Reindeer’ finished, I thought, ‘This is what I’m going to do now.’”

Sitting across from the mild-mannered Gadd, the magnitude of his transformation on screen for “Half Man” becomes even more impressive. Gadd comes off as thoughtful and emphatic, while Ruben, his physically imposing character, commands trepidation.

“The second ‘Baby Reindeer’ finished, I thought, ‘This is what I’m going to do now,’” Gadd says about working on “Half Man.”

(Ian Spanier / For The Times)

Watching Gadd as the rage-fueled Ruben, one might be surprised to learn he originally had no intention of acting in “Half Man.” After wearing multiple hats on “Baby Reindeer,” Gadd thought this time around he could get a purely external bird’s-eye view of a project as showrunner and writer of “Half Man.” But eventually people around him suggested he should be in front of the camera once again.

“My initial response was always, ‘That’s just so far away from anything I’ve done before. It’s so far away from me. Are people going to buy it?’” he recalls. “And behind every single fear-based thought was a worry of what people might think, which in my opinion, isn’t a good enough reason to not do something.”

Convinced audiences would struggle to see the guy from “Baby Reindeer” as this “hard man,” a U.K. term for tough and intimidating men, he had to physically morph. To inhabit a new body, Gadd underwent a strict exercise regimen, and most importantly, a new diet.

“I had a chef make these meals in England, fun enough, and send them up to Scotland where I was filming,” he recalls. “I’d eat them at specific times. You go through periods of fasting and through dehydration whenever you had your top off. There was a real science to it.”

And yet, though he at first worried he wouldn’t look big enough, Gadd refused to portray Ruben with a chiseled physique conceived for mere aesthetics.

“I didn’t want him to have a six pack, I wanted him to feel like a real person,” Gadd says. “Sometimes when you see someone on TV and they’re ripped, I almost don’t think that’s real strength. Someone like Ruben, they wear their life in their body, they’re heavy set. It’s not ripped. It’s bulky. It’s natural to him.”

Before he agreed to play the character, Gadd auditioned numerous actors for the part, but with all of them he felt they were too focused on his appearance as an imposing figure and not his inner turmoil. “Ruben is extremely sad as a person. He’s terribly broken and traumatized,” he says.

For the series, Gadd bulked up to become more physically imposing: “Someone like Ruben, they wear their life in their body, they’re heavy set. It’s not ripped. It’s bulky. It’s natural to him.” Richard Gadd in “Half Man.” (Anne Binckebanck / HBO)

When asked if he sees himself as Ruben, Gadd contemplates the question, debating whether it’s his “jetlagged brain” or ambivalence about finding some of Ruben within him.

“Do I see myself in Ruben?” After a pause, he concedes: “All of his behavior is a reaction to a deep traumatic happening in his life. I can relate to finding it extremely difficult to get past big traumatic events and coming to terms with them and coming to terms with yourself even as a result of them.”

With less hesitation, Bell, 40, acknowledges that he finds a certain kinship with his character. As a teenager, Bell flocked to people with a defiant edge. “I grew up without a father in an all-female household and I felt very naked as a child in terms of needing to be protected by someone who was dominant and aggressive,” he says. “I totally understand why Niall seeks solace in someone like him. No one will touch Ruben. There is a safety in that.”

Gadd says he doesn’t think about celebrities when searching for the actors. “I’m quite fame-averse when it comes to casting because I think sometimes it can get in the way,” he explains. “You can have a show, which starts up with all the best intentions, turn into a sort of acting vehicle for someone, or the discussion becomes about the actor doing this role.”

That said, when the casting director on “Half Man” asked him about his “dream cast,” Gadd expressed Bell was the only one who would genuinely excite him. But could that happen? “In my head, I was still in pre-‘Baby Reindeer’ time where I thought, ‘Well, somebody like him is not going to be interested.’ And then I thought, ‘Well, he might be,’” Gadd says.

For his part, Bell found the “nihilism” in Niall, a man desperately running from his true self and living in Ruben’s shadow, an enticing and complex character to play. “[Niall] conceals himself in many different ways, and has a lot of self-loathing, but at the same time has all these ambitions and actually is incredibly egotistical and thinks that his way is the correct way, and that other people don’t understand that he is terminally unique,” Bell explains with a chuckle.

Bell, who plays Niall, says his character “conceals himself in many different ways, and has a lot of self-loathing, but at the same time has all these ambitions and actually is incredibly egotistical …”

(Anne Binckebanck / HBO)

Aside from a tight schedule to produce “Half Man,” the challenge for Bell was adjusting to the dramatic intensity that Gadd was after. “I wasn’t particularly prepared for that, therefore sometimes my reading of certain scenes I’d get wrong. We’d start scenes and Richard was like, ‘You are pitching it at like a six, and this is very much an 11,’” Bell recalls laughing. I was like, ‘Oh, OK.’ That took some modulating.”

In Gadd’s mind, Bell remains an “underrated” artist. A proud Scotsman, Gadd recalls loving Bell in the 2007 romantic dramedy “Hallam Foe,” where the British actor played Scottish. For “Half Man,” Gadd thought Bell could convey the pain that haunts Niall, even as his actions paint him less like Ruben’s victim and more like a vengeful participant in the chaos.

“There’s always something I find so vulnerable about Jamie and I knew that I was going to take Niall in some really big journeys where he was going to almost test the audience’s love for him,” Gadd says. That Niall finds Ruben so alluring is natural to Gadd, who believes the notion of a valiant male figure has been bred into everyone via fables and fairy tales.

Gadd adds that whether or not we like to admit it, we’re drawn to alpha male characters. “Because from an early age, we’ve been told they are always at the top of the social hierarchy. And as a result, we’ve always, as a society, answered to those kinds of people as some sort of leaders.”

And though he says he’s unfamiliar with the “manosphere,” the misogynistic and chauvinistic online community, Gadd doesn’t believe Ruben would fall for the gurus in those circles who claim to have the answers for young guys to become “real men.”

“Ruben carved his own masculinity. To give him credit, if that’s even something you can give him, those spaces wouldn’t hold any weight for him. He’s his own man,” Gad says. “He would never follow anyone on social media. He’s the person to be followed.”

Based on the tone of Gadd’s output thus far, it may come as a surprise that as a young person he dreamed of creating a show along the lines of the U.K.’s “The Office,” which he considers a “perfect piece of art.” The stories he is telling now better reflect his “neuroses” and the experiences he’s endured.

“My life just took a very dramatic turn, and my sensibilities weren’t workplace sitcoms anymore. When I grew up and I was doing comedy I thought, ‘I’ll write a sitcom one day and every character will be sort of funny in it,’” he says. “But my life just took a turn to the point where I needed my writing and my art darkened because what I went through was very dark.”

Humor is not entirely absent from “Half Man,” some of the characters’ reactions to their distressing realities earn a chuckle. Still, Gadd’s funny bone might also find an outlet in other people’s narratives. He was recently announced as part of the cast in Apple TV’s upcoming high-concept series “Husbands,” for which he already shot his scenes. Adapted from a bestselling novel of the same name, it stars Juno Temple as a woman who gets to experience life with a different partner every time she changes the light bulb in her attic.

“I’m very picky with stuff I take on. Because I love writing my own work so much, anything that takes me out on someone else’s show has to be very special. And this was very special,” Gadd says.

“Everything I do doesn’t have to be dark,” he adds with a soft smile.