ABU DHABI // Toxic threats will continue to grow, international experts have said, and combating them requires expertise.
Among the counter-measures that can be implemented are training programmes.
“Threats of chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) and toxin devices have been with us for a lot longer than just recently and they will continue to,” said Gwyn Winfield, editorial director of CBRNe World in the UK. “The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been looking into thousands of incidents a year. Many of the skills, training techniques and equipment have a wide variety of utility in a number of incidents, not just in CBRN.”
These high-tech threats include toxic chemicals, pathogens, micro-organisms, radioactive materials and radiation from nuclear devices. They can cause paralysis and can leave long-standing effects.
“It’s not a theoretical threat, it’s multi-dimensional,” said Dr Henk Geveke, managing director of defence, safety and security at The Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research. “It’s a real threat which is why it’s on the political and research agendas.”
He said these threats were ones of low probability and high impact.
“No politician can afford to do nothing about it,” he said. “You need to have cost-effective solutions because it’s a low-probability incident so not much money goes into it.”
He said the main question remained how to counter such threats. There are fourth pathways, Dr Geveke said: counter-proliferation, weapons destruction, shoot-before-you-get-shot and counter-measures. He said the main challenge was to be technology smart, designing a multifunctional device.
“That’s the way ahead,” he said. “Innovate in your crisis management system and make the public aware. Politicians and the public tend to regard them as a technical scary thing but there is a risk and you need to show them facts. Governments must make the trade-off by adopting a comprehensive approach. That’s the only way to have investments proportional to the threats.”
Dieter Rothbacher, director of operations at Hotzone Solutions Group in Austria, said preparedness, including extensive training programmes, was key.
“The risk of CBRN attacks and their detrimental consequences in an urban setting has been recognised for some time but very little has been done to quantitatively assess those risks.”
cmalek@thenational.ae
