PRAGUE, Czech Republic — NATO has chosen the Czech Republic to train and lead a specialized, multinational unit aimed at defending alliance countries against weapons of mass destruction.
The unit--dubbed CBRN for the chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear defense battalion--was launched earlier this month and will include troops from 15 NATO members and two countries now joining the alliance. The unit would be fully operational in July.
NATO has created this new battalion "to help protect our soldiers with a fast, flexible, deployable unit equipped to meet the threat," said NATO Secretary General George Robertson.
NATO chose the Czechs because of their pre-eminence in the field. As a member of the former Warsaw Pact, then-Czechoslovakia was responsible for protecting its partners from nuclear, biological and chemical attack.
Heightened fears that weapons of mass destruction could be used to attack military targets and civilian populations prompted NATO to develop the battalion as part of a new, rapid-deployment capability. The specialist units also are expected to play an important role in the event of domestic terrorist attacks.
"The governments have all agreed it's a threat and that they need to be involved," said Luke Hill, an analyst with Jane's Defense Weekly.
The battalion will operate independently and as part of the new NATO Response Force, a rapid-deployment unit of as many as 21,000 soldiers that began training in October but won't be fully operational for three more years.
Once ready, the NATO Response Force could be dispatched in as little as five days and sustain itself for a month, according to NATO.
The CBRN battalion has capabilities that will enable NATO troops to carry out missions under the threat of nuclear, biological or chemical attack.
The battalion possesses mobile analysis labs that can work in contaminated areas; specialized infection hospitals that will carry stocks of vaccines for biological weapons; reconnaissance and risk assessment teams; and decontamination equipment.
"Possible operational scenarios include threat or real use of WMD [weapons of mass destruction] against military or civil objectives, industrial accidents of great scale and outflows of dangerous materials caused by natural catastrophes," said Petr Pavel, the Czechs' deputy commander of joint forces.
Such agile and specialized forces previously were alien to NATO operations.
"The threat from chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons is real, indeed," Robertson said.
"The technology to produce such weapons is all too simple. And we now know that there are people who are willing to use them irrespective of their horrific effects."
Two years after the collapse of communism in Europe, the Czech units proved their superior skills in the 1991 Persian Gulf war--detecting minuscule levels of deadly nerve agents that U.S. troops failed to pick up.
But rather than have the Czechs simply train their own battalion for rapid deployment with the NATO Response Force, NATO's new approach is to increasingly integrate one country's expertise across the borders of the alliance members.
"The level of international cooperation will go much deeper," NATO spokesman Robert Pszczel said. "In some ways the Warsaw Pact was much more integrated."
He said that with so many countries involved, governments are able to spread the financial burden of maintaining short-notice, combat-ready troops. The cumulative outlay for the CBRN is difficult to determine, but Pavel put the Czech Republic's costs at nearly $4 million.
Once a nation's CBRN troops are trained, they will be on call from their home country, on a rotational basis, for quick, NATO-directed deployment abroad. But they also will be able to aid their civilian emergency crews in case of a terrorist attack at home, according to Pszczel. Germany will take command of the unit in six months.