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NATO Response: NATO to Approve New WMD Initiatives; Special Focus on Biodefense By Bryan Bender As NATO heads of state gather in Prague Thursday and Friday to invite seven new members to join their ranks — expanding the Western military alliance further eastward into the territory of the former Soviet Union — summit participants are expected to approve at least five new initiatives. “Special considerations” are to be given to enhancing biological defenses, considered a key shortfall in NATO planning over the years, which has been more concerned with nuclear and chemical weapons, according to the documents. Collectively known as the NATO Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Defense Initiatives, first proposed in June, the new initiatives call for developing an alliancewide disease surveillance system; establishing a nuclear, biological and chemical event response team; creating a mobile nuclear, biological and chemical analytical laboratory; establishing a coordinated NATO stockpile of chemical and biological defense materials; and expanding nuclear, biological and chemical training and education. “The NBC Defense Initiatives were developed by NATO’s Senior Defense Group on Proliferation and endorsed by defense ministers in June 2002,” according to a NATO briefing. “They were designed to serve as a first step in addressing the most critical deficiencies in NATO’s NBC defenses. These initiatives will be developed over the next year and will emphasize multinational participation and the rapid fielding of enhanced capabilities.” As part of its shift away from defending Western Europe from conventional military attack to preparing for new threats, NATO will also outline a new command structure to better reflect new realities, officials said. The clearest sign of the new direction may be discussion of a NATO response force of up to 20,000 troops that could quickly deploy in the event of a crisis both inside and beyond the alliance’s historic sphere of influence. NATO members are expected to extend invitations to the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and to Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, formerly members of the Warsaw Pact. The new NATO-Russia Council, meanwhile, also plans to discuss future cooperation with Moscow. As the alliance expands eastward, however, NATO officials have said that the threat from weapons of mass destruction — to military forces as well as population centers — is also expanding and that the alliance must take steps to improve its capability to deal with a catastrophic event — particularly a biological attack. The documents acknowledge that NATO is particularly deficient in biological defense, noting that “NATO capabilities are optimized for chemical defense” rather than biological weapons. The first step is to establish a disease surveillance system to collect information on unusual disease outbreaks, alert NATO commanders of a biological outbreak and fuse the data with other information sources. To respond to an attack involving weapons of mass destruction, NATO members plan to establish a prototype nuclear, biological and chemical event response team to assess the effects of a WMD event, advise commanders on mitigating the effects and enable the alliance to “reach back” to national experts for technical advice. The response team would include an NBC-trained commander, a biological weapons specialist, an NBC specialist, a medical doctor, an NBC explosive ordnance expert, a communications specialist and a public affairs and information operations support officer. Equipment might include detection devices, communications equipment and NBC assessment tools. Also needed, according to NATO, is a mobile laboratory that could be quickly and easily transported to investigate and collect samples of a possible nuclear, biological or chemical contamination and conduct highly reliable scientific analysis of samples. Meanwhile, alliance members will probably agree to pool their resources, establishing a NATO chemical-biological defense stockpile that will help members to identify and share national supply inventories, rapidly move needed materials and improve medical treatment protocols, according to the NATO documents. Lastly, NATO plans to seek during the next year to enhance the knowledge of senior officials on nuclear, biological and chemical issues through education, while improving understanding of the operational effect of WMD weapons and otherwise strengthening WMD training. U.S. national security adviser Condoleeza Rice, briefing reporters last Friday on the summit, said that in the future NATO will have to focus new attention on the threat from weapons of mass destruction. “Iraq is typical or the most important example of the kind of threat that NATO will face in the future,” she said.
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