Horizon scanning the future of CBRN threats

The problems and prospects for CBRN over the next decade, as seen by seasoned expert Dan Kaszeta. Looking to the future, the author examines why separate protective suits might vanish, why every vehicle could become a CBRN sensor, and how treating these threats as an operational condition could radically reshape thinking and attitudes on CBRN defence.

Your correspondent has spent 33 years in chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) defence, in either part-time or full-time roles. Many things have come a long way in those 33 years, while other things have hardly changed at all. On the one hand, electronic devices do some amazing things that would have seemed like science fiction when I was a young Lieutenant. On the other hand, you still really cannot beat soap and water for many decontamination tasks. The editor at this publication has indulged me and allowed me to be a bit more broad-ranging and philosophical about where we are, where we are going, and where we ought to be heading. One person’s ‘horizon scan’ is another person’s mad rant, but hopefully my thoughts will be useful. By necessity, this article will cover a range of topics and no particular weight is attached to the order in which these thoughts are presented.

Hope is not our anchor. The pendulum swings

The entire reason why CBRN defence exists as a discipline in military and security affairs is that optimism and luck are not substantial enough to prevent, mitigate, or respond to CBRN threats. These threats have not gone away. Warfare comes and goes, and sometimes someone tries chemical weapons for one reason or another. We have seen it in Syria and, mostly (so far) in the form of tear gas in the Ukraine conflict. Yet we also live in a technological world. Industrial and transportation accidents can unleash chemical catastrophe more dire than many actual acts of chemical warfare. Nuclear power accidents, although they are rare, do occur. It is rare to see government officials come straight out and say ‘It will never happen’ about CBRN, but it is routine to see them behave managerially and organisationally as if that is their maxim.

The counterpart of the ‘it will never happen’ attitude is the inevitable swing of the pendulum over to ‘throw money at it so it will never happen again.’ Many people in CBRN owe their career progression to such swings of the pendulum. However, just because it was good for me, and in a roundabout way a Japanese cult’s use of Sarin placed me in the White House a year later, it does not mean that it is always good for everyone. It is increasingly apparent that many of the truly significant changes in CBRN defence and response technology happened in part or in their entirety due to hasty reactions to CBRN incidents. The resources and emphasis on finding solutions to CBRN problems are most acutely noted when a bad thing has happened. No decent CBRN programme manager lets a good crisis go to waste.

Science and industry spent a decade working on biological detection after some anthrax spores were used by a terrorist in 2001. Nobody can dispute that some of that money and effort spawned useful developments. A lot of the effort dried up when upper management got bored of it and started spending money elsewhere. The prospect of smuggling of radioactive materials out of the former Soviet Union in the 1990s spawned an entire industry to scan cargo containers, made isotope identification far cheaper, and brought radiation detection training to thousands of customs inspectors around the world. In actuality, most incidents of ‘nuclear smuggling’ were minor or even fictional, driven by hoaxes and law enforcement stings. Even so, the ubiquity of radiation detection in commercial shipping also means that covert shipment of radioactive materials will remain largely an empty threat.

Relying on hope and the pendulum effect do not lead to good public policy. The ultimate solution to CBRN warfare and CBRN terrorism is to make them not worth the trouble for the perpetrators. In a lot of ways, society has been broadly successful on both counts. Making it harder to cause harm with CBRN materials and making it faster and easier to respond to their use is better if these things happen BEFORE an incident and not just as a ‘lock the barn door after the horse has fled’ after-the-fact practice.

Industrial threats

The chemical threat is at least as likely to come from industrial sources as national CBRN programmes or terrorist groups. In many ways, the burgeoning quantity of hazardous substances in use in industry and agriculture around the world represent a far greater hazard than chemical or biological warfare agents. Arms control has greatly reduced, but not totally eliminated, the possibility and scope for nations to build the industrial wherewithal for chemical weapons manufacturing. However, there are thousands of chemical compounds used in science, medicine, industry, and agriculture that are, in many different ways, fundamentally more dangerous than many of the compounds classed as chemical warfare agents. Some of these substances are stored or transported in quantities of up to thousands of tonnes.

Threats in this area fall into three categories. First, there is the threat of accident from transportation or industrial reasons. Infamous incidents at Bhopal in India and, more recently, Palestine, Ohio, are but two examples of this threat category. Second, states or non-state actors could use industrial chemicals for nefarious purposes. States could openly manufacture or purchase them. Terrorist groups could easily steal them. Such incidents could even be passed off as accidents.

Finally, there’s the threat of chemical warfare by proxy. Military strikes or terrorist attacks on civilian factories could unleash a Bhopal-by-design. This actually happened in Croatia during the breakup of Yugoslavia. It is a valid area of concern for future conflicts. For example, given the unhealthy chemicals used in the semiconductor industry, could a strike by China on constitute chemical warfare by proxy. If the battlefield already contains dangerous chemicals, then conventional weapons can be used for a chemical attack, with a degree of deniability.

Arms control and non-proliferation

Broadly speaking, chemical and biological arms control has been a general success. The relevant treaties have mostly been upheld. Given the numbers of conflicts in the world in previous decades, we have witnessed relatively few incidents of chemical warfare and no incidents of biological warfare. Having said that, ongoing wars in Syria and Ukraine have pushed the limits quite hard. In Syria, chlorine and Sarin have been used for lethal effect. In Ukraine, Russia has used tear gas, a milder weapon, but one still prohibited. The use of chemicals in these wars has earned harsh language but comparatively few effective sanctions. Perhaps the world needs more levers that it can use more quickly.

Riot control agents such as tear gas need a harder look from the arms control regimes. The fact that the Chemical Weapons Convention allows their use in domestic policing but bans them in war causes much confusion. Modern toxicology takes a dimmer view now than in the past on the acute and chronic health effects of burning-type CS gas (the most common tear gas) munitions. A better regulatory regime would restrict or ban burning riot control munitions altogether, while leaving individual spray-type devices for police use as a legal option. The latter are far less problematic from a safety and toxicology perspective and give far less scope for their use on the battlefield.

One glaring deficit is that the world has a treaty on biological weapons, the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), that is a poor cousin compared to the later Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). The BWC not only lacks the level of detail of the CWC, it lacks an implementation and enforcement arm. In chemical arms control, there is an entire 500-person international organisation, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), established to implement the CWC treaty. There is no biological equivalent. The world has no ‘OPBW’ to implement the BWC, and many of the provisions of the BWC are vague and would be hard to regulate or implement in a world where the biotech industry is worth many billions. The BWC is overdue for a robust replacement and the world needs an ‘OPBW’. Whether a new agency is needed or whether the OPCW can be enlarged into an ‘OPCBW’ is certainly a valid subject for debate. It will not be easy, though. The CWC and OPCW came into existence in part through heavy engagement with the chemical industry. Similar engagement with the biotech and pharmaceutical sectors will be needed for a meaningful regime that can extend into biological non-proliferation.

Arms control treaties and non-proliferation agreements are excellent but rely extensively on voluntary compliance. The legal regime that prohibits chemical and biological warfare is seriously degraded in value if their provisions are not enforced. The world needs to re-examine what levers and leverage it has to enforce ‘yellow cards’ and ‘red lines’ in chemical and biological matters. Some of the levers that the world can use are coercive. The lack of clear retaliation against the Assad regime in 2013 for use of Sarin at Ghouta led to numerous later incidents. However, armed retaliation in an effective, precise, and broadly safe manner relies mostly on a handful of countries such as the USA being policemen. As we can see with the use of tear gas in the Russia/Ukraine conflict, if one of the parties is a nuclear-armed power, military retaliation by third parties may not be helpful.

Perhaps we need a bit of rethink on what kinds of levers and leverage are actually useful. Some years ago, your correspondent had an epiphany. Most conflicts do not involve chemical and biological warfare, and most countries do not attempt to develop such weapons. Certainly, arms control agreements play a part in this. By making such weapons into a widely agreed international taboo, many countries do not risk the opprobrium that is rightly heaped upon offenders.

There is another factor, though. The risk of a taboo is that it engenders lazy thinking and many people believe that chemical and biological weapons are banned because, somehow, they are so awful and bad. The historical record does not actually bear this out, though. Chemical and biological weapons are a category of armaments that have, historically, rarely lived up to the expectations of their proponents. They are imprecise and unpredictable in an era where military commanders want precision and predictability. They are subject to environmental variables to such an extent that a lot of money can be squandered for no tactical effect, or worse, fratricide. International efforts in chemical and biological arms control have been pushing at an open door because in most places and at most times, existing conventional lethality is a far better use for a country’s resources than chemical or biological weapons. Perhaps some rhetoric that makes this point from time to time would actually be helpful to the broader cause. If more people understood that chemical and biological warfare is not really worth the trouble, in every sense, then we would not need this column.

New threats and opportunities

The one persistent problem with the ‘it is not worth the effort’ argument is that chemistry, biology, and their related engineering disciplines are not static. There are areas where problems could emerge. One of these is nanotechnology, which represents both potential problems and solutions in the sphere of CBRN threats and responses. Encapsulating small droplets of chemical agent or biological material inside nano-particles could make them harder to detect, more persistent in the environment, better able to contaminate some kinds of objects and surfaces, harder to decontaminate, and harder to protect against with traditional protection methods. It should also be noted that nano-scale technology also shows promise in CBRN defence. Specialist nanoparticles might be developed as decontamination materials or filtration components. Various nano-scale engineering techniques might be employed to make detection equipment smaller.

Three-dimensional printing technologies could eventually pose both threats and opportunities in the CBRN defence segment. Munitions would not necessarily need to be designed, built, and then shipped to a destination country in order to proliferate chemical and biological munition technology. A design could be literally emailed and 3D printing could enable production close to the point of use. In addition, the world is not that many years away from, for lack of a better term, 3D printing of chemicals. Advanced devices that can synthesise specific complex molecules are being considered in the pharmaceutical and biotech realms. It does not take too much imagination to think that some highly dangerous materials useful as biological warfare toxins or chemical warfare agents might be able to be synthesised in such a way. It is fiction today, but it may not be in a decade’s time.

Messenger RNA (mRNA) is another area to watch. While some people talking about the possible threats from mRNA technology are, in fact, conspiracy theorists, mRNA technology also represents some interesting advances that could be either threats or opportunities. It is theoretically possible to use mRNA to produce complex biological materials that could affect numerous physiological functions in the human body such as sleep, blood pressure, or body temperature. By using mRNA to make bioregulators that make everyone sleepy or cause heat injuries to an enemy army, it represents a new frontier in offensive biological technology that needs to get watched closely. All is not bad, however. The same clever biochemical mechanisms that make mRNA a threat also mean that such techniques could also provide useful new avenues for CBRN medical countermeasures. Nanotechnologies and mRNA are classic examples of dual-use technologies.

Knock-on effects and feedback loops

Science and technology will progress across all of the disciplines that affect CBRN defence. But sometimes a technical advance will move the goalposts and requirements in another area. I can think of two examples that will likely emerge in the next decade. First, there is the ‘knock-on’ effect. A trend or development forces something else in an adjacent sphere of activity to happen. In the case of CBRN protection, advances in scientific understanding in the areas of molecular biology and toxicology will lead to heightened awareness of the hazards of chemical warfare agents at low levels.

For example, scientific inquiries into the nature of so-called Gulf War Illness have led to some peer-reviewed findings that some people have a gene that renders them more susceptible to nerve agent poisoning. Few had heard of the PON1 gene before, but some people have it, making them more susceptible to low level exposure to nerve agents. Greater awareness of the chronic effects of exposure to low levels of chemical threats is an interesting thing in this world where things such as Gulf War Illness and burn pits are going to end up as cost centres on government spreadsheets. Costly medical expenses and disability pensions may just drive some changes.

Since chemical exposure may be more dangerous than previously thought, it raises the valid question of whether the current types of respiratory protection used by the world’s militaries is adequate to the task. There is a reason that civilian hazmat responders largely do not use filter-based negative pressure respirators except in tightly-defined scenarios. They use a self-contained breathing apparatus for most scenarios because the protection factor provided by military-style filter masks is simply inadequate in a scenario that is well-regulated by health and safety rules. Billions in pay-outs and disability liabilities may sit on the balance sheets of defence ministries because they spent decades not considering the health and safety of their increasingly professional, non-conscript career militaries.

Eventually, maybe not this year or even this decade, there will be an epiphany that existing military respiratory protection technologies are not up to the task of CBRN force protection. This may lead to either improved filtration technology or a shift to powered air-purifying masks. These are a half-way step between traditional filter masks and air-supplying respirators, which are too bulky for most military uses. Powered air-purifying respirators exist now, and I predict they will become the future standard. In the short term, this might even mean masks get heavier but also more comfortable to wear and safer for the wearer.

A feedback loop is happening in the areas of detection and decontamination. The question of ‘how clean is clean enough?’ already plagues CBRN decontamination. Since nobody can prove a negative, the practical answer is usually ‘it is clean enough if we cannot detect the hazard.’ However, improvements in detection technology will inevitably lower the detection thresholds. Smaller amounts of hazards, particularly non-volatile nerve agents such as the Novichok-series agents, will be able to be to be detected more easily. Various government acquisition programmes are certainly heading in this direction.

Fielding a new generation of chemical agent detectors will mean that some decontamination techniques or products in use now may not be considered good enough as lower levels of hazards will be detectable. This would drive more investment into decontamination research. Such a feedback loop could go on for decades. As decontamination often requires contact time, it is even possible that more sensitive detection equipment may force decontamination backwards in terms of operational impact. In other words, if decontamination technology does not keep up with detection, it will take LONGER to decontaminate as armies adopt newer, more stringent standards of how clean something must be before it can be returned to service.

Some things may disappear

The trajectory of military CBRN protective suit technology has been one of progressively lighter-weight suits with a lower heat burden. Many normal non-CBRN combat uniforms have been creeping up in cost. Eventually, these curves are going to get close to meeting. Right now, there is not really any technical barrier to making a regular combat uniform that has CBRN protective capabilities. The barriers are willpower and cost. Much of the cost in CBRN protective textiles comes down with economies of scale. Will we see the disappearance of regular CBRN suits for combat and combat support soldiers? Will the regular uniform be a CBRN suit by design? This is certainly possible. All combat boots can be made with a CBRN layer. All gloves can be made with a protective barrier layer. This technology is already out there. Making sure that soldiers take their chemical protective clothing to the field with them is easy if ALL of their clothing is chemical protective by default. Willpower and budget are the obstacle, not technology.

Although countries continue to develop and buy CBRN reconnaissance vehicles, in many ways these are a dated concept. Miniaturisation, automation, and improvements in connectivity pathways on the battlefield have meant that all kinds of sensors are on combat vehicles already. It is easy to put more chemical and radiological instrumentation than existed on a CBRN recce vehicle 20 years ago, reporting back to a command centre, onto every tank, APC, and IFV on the battlefield. If we can make everything large that moves and communicates on the battlefield into a CBRN sensor, we obviate most of the missions for dedicated CBRN recce vehicles. With a modicum of connectivity, everything becomes a CBRN recce vehicle.

What will not disappear, though, is the mobile laboratory. The advances that make equipment smaller, lighter, and easier to use mean that the things that were on a CBRN recce vehicle can go on every vehicle. Yet it also means that many of the things that are in a full laboratory on a university campus can be shrunk down and put into a vehicle. More sophisticated capability can be put closer to where it is needed.

CBRN is an operating condition

About halfway through my career, I realised that CBRN warfare was merely an operating condition, much like jungle warfare, cold weather, mountains, or deserts. Militaries apply knowledge, technology, and training to mitigate against the hazards posed by cold weather, hot weather, difficult terrain, and diseases. All of those have, collectively, killed more soldiers than CBRN warfare over the centuries. Yet somehow, militaries tend to place CBRN into some other more fearful category. This leads to a ‘we are afraid of it’ mentality that is a bit nonsensical. If you said ‘we are afraid of hot weather’ you would be laughed out of the barracks.

The sane and rational way to train for CBRN threats to treat it not merely as a form of enemy attack, even though it is that, but to treat the phenomena associated with CBRN attacks as principally an operating environment just like hot weather or a jungle full of insects and water. If done properly, this takes the fear out of the equation. How does a military accomplish it?

First, stop using fear and physical misery as the motivator. Most military members veterans look at CBRN training with a bit of displeasure because their initial experiences scarred them. Perhaps using tear gas as ‘confidence training’ is an outdated practice, used more as a hazing ritual than as legitimate CBRN training, and needs to stop. I say that as someone who used to inflict it. We don’t give people heart attacks to practice CPR and we don’t shoot back during basic marksmanship training. So, perhaps, making the CBRN training so miserable that nobody wants to do it is counterproductive.

Secondly, soldiers view CBRN gear as uncomfortable. As mentioned above, one way around this is to normalise the gear where possible. If the only uniform a soldier knows is the field battle dress camouflage uniform that he or she wears in basic training also happens to have a lot of CBRN protection potential, then there is less stigma in CBRN training – because he or she is not donning a massive, thick, uncomfortable special suit. Every time a soldier goes to the range to qualify on the weapon, it will be done wearing the CBRN suit because the CBRN suit and the default uniform are the same bit of clothing. Likewise, if the mask is made more comfortable by having a positive pressure blower, wide lenses instead of two narrow eyepieces, and less need to strap it tightly and give the wearer a headache, then perhaps the experience does not reinforce poor attitudes.

The horizon is mixed

Where does all of this leave us? The threat just will not go away completely, but the nature of the threat continues to evolve. The challenge is to make sure that the defensive countermeasures evolve both in terms of capability and affordability. Underpinning the defensive arms races is a diplomatic, conceptual, and philosophical struggle, which makes it easier to reduce the likelihood of threats and makes it easier to use defensive technologies. Making CBRN warfare not worth the effort will continue to require effort and investment.

Dan Kaszeta