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Response in bio-attack drills draws praise

Czechs lead NATO in chemical capability but more work to be done

By Lisa Nuch Venbrux
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
July 18th, 2007 issue

VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST
A volunteer writhes in mock agony as a team pretends to wash contaminants from his skin.
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VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST
A boy offers to have his head shaven; it is almost impossible to decontaminate hair after a chemical or radiological attack.
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Cleanup toolbox checklist

Protective suits with 30-minute air supplies
Tents to assemble casualties (must be set up within 45 minutes)
Ecolocators to check for possible structural collapse
Morphine for the injured
Handheld chemical surveyors
Bags to hold valuables and others to collect clothing for incineration
Shaver to remove contaminated hair
ACHR 90 chemical decontamination truck, with 6,000 liters of water and solution and a pump to gather chemicals
Nonabsorbing platform to roll casualties through washing phase (use water or weak chlorine solution)
Sealants to prevent chemicals from getting in sewers, containers for
runoff water
Linka 82 automated decontamination line, to systematically spray vehicles

Shortly after 10 a.m. July 12, an explosion reverberated through Liberec’s Tipsport Arena. Alarms sounded while wailing spectators streamed up steep staircases to escape. Others smeared in fake blood lied prostrate across rows of chairs, moaning in artificial agony. Amid clouds of smoke, teams dressed in full-body protective suits rushed victims from the scene of a simulated chemical blitz.
This staged terrorist attack capped a week-long seminar organized by the Defense Ministry and attended by NATO representatives from all 26 member countries. During their visit, the delegates witnessed two demonstrations of how Czech forces would respond to chemical and radiological attacks, first at a fictitious sporting event then at Army barracks across town. Scores of civilians and hundreds of firefighters, police officers, medics and soldiers participated.
To some, the simulation provided further proof of the country’s standout expertise in chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear defense.
“It’s very well-coordinated,” mused British Army Major Kevin Folde, who was among those sent by the United Kingdom to observe the demonstration. “You can see they’ve thought about every procedure.”
That response teams appear skilled at handling a chemical crisis should come as no surprise. In 2002, NATO delegates met for a summit in Prague and outlined plans to create the Multinational Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) Defense Battalion to be based in Liberec, north Bohemia.
The battalion, which became fully operational in 2003, is designed to counter CBRN threats wherever NATO missions require, according to Ivan Dvořák of the Defense Ministry. Leadership rotates among about a dozen member states that contribute specialists to the force. Even before the Czech Republic took the initial lead role, the country’s experts have been the backbone of NATO expertise in this area.
“The Czech Republic is, in many respects, ahead of everybody else,” said Kenneth Handelman, principal director of counter-narcotics, counter-proliferation and global threats at the U.S. Defense Department, who attended the exercises.
The task of handling wounded and decontaminating both people and surroundings was the key part of the responses demonstrated recently. Protective suits with air supplies, handheld chemical detection equipment, sophisticated custom-built decontamination vehicles and simple showers contributed to a swift process carried out immediately following the explosions.
While skills to react to attacks have continually progressed, Czech know-how in this area arose as early as the 1950s.
“These kinds of capabilities [were] developed during the Cold War years under the Warsaw Pact, so it wasn’t something new built from scratch,” says Jiří Schneider, program director of the Prague Security Studies Institute.
Under the Warsaw Pact, which served as a cooperative defense treaty among communist states in Europe, Czechoslovakia came to specialize in protection against chemical and biological weapons. Czechoslovak specialists were deployed on the front lines in Kuwait, near the Iraqi border, during the first Gulf War in 1991.
“I think they proved to be quite effective,” Schneider said. “That was one of the reasons it was decided to develop further this kind of capability.”
Since the country joined NATO in 1999, it has taken steps to modernize, he said, allowing it to retain a specialized expertise, what’s called a “niche capability” in NATO terminology.
“We need more and more niche capabilities,” said a NATO official who declined to be named because she was not authorized to speak to the press. These specialized areas became important as former Eastern bloc countries joined the alliance without the large military forces other countries could provide.
“The question was often, ‘Do they all have to have big air forces? If they’re a coastal nation, big navies? All the weaponry that other countries have?’ And the answer we give is ‘No,’ ” she said.
Slovakia, for instance, contributes exceptional engineering skills, while Latvians and Estonians are experts at removing landmines.
According to the United States’ Handelman, the Czech Republic has distinguished itself since 2003 through two channels: disease surveillance capability and mentorship in WMD defense.
But, he stressed, there’s much more work to be done: “You have to crawl before you can walk.” Better cooperation is needed, for example, between NATO and the EU, Dvořák said.
Furthermore, said John Hart, head of the Chemical and Biological Warfare Programme at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, some consequences of attacks simply cannot be undone.
“In the case of a bioterrorism incident, the public might wish to have complete decontamination. This can be extremely expensive and perhaps impossible both in terms of financial coasts and technically,” he said.
Turnover among the few people privileged with CBRN weapon-related expertise may also slow development, according to Hart. “Once these individuals retire or move to another position, a great deal of expertise and institutional memory must be recreated.”
These exercises, then, are not designed to come up with answers, Handelman said. They’re for learning to ask the right questions.
—Naďa Černá and Hela Balínová contributed to this report.

Lisa Nuch Venbrux can be reached at lvenbrux@praguepost.com


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