Preventing Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Disaster

CBRN disaster prevention has become one of the harder problems in Indian disaster management. Events involving chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear materials damage life, property and the environment, and they undermine the foundations of sustainable development. The threats are also changing quickly, driven by rapid technological development and a shifting political climate.

Preparing India to deal with them is a formidable challenge, because anticipating such an attack and dealing with its consequences are both difficult propositions. This review, published in The Journal of Governance in January 2021 by Rakesh Kumar Sharma and Kunal Sharma, sets out what the national guidelines require and how a preparedness and response strategy can be built around them.

Where the CBRN threat comes from

CBRN substances have a wide range of hazardous properties, including combustibility, corrosiveness and toxicity. Incidents cause injury or illness to living organisms and can turn into mass casualty events, while also damaging or disrupting the environment.

They arise in several ways: ignorance, negligence, incompetence, accident, malicious intent, or deliberate use in warfare. Naturally occurring biological hazards, including emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, form part of the same picture. So does the intentional use of micro-organisms, natural or genetically modified, and of toxins derived from living organisms. Toxins sit awkwardly across the categories, since they can be classed as both chemical and biological warfare agents.

Threat perception is further complicated by the activities of hostile countries, non-state actors and terrorist groups, and by the possibility of state-sponsored attacks on individuals using CBRN agents.

What CBRN disaster prevention involves

The main preventive measures are stricter techno-legal regimes, deterrence of proliferation, and capability development and deployment. As the likelihood of CBRN confrontation rises, the case for stronger medical preparedness becomes more pressing than it has ever been.

Building a response system means drawing on expertise, professional experience and advanced knowledge of the CBRN field. Sharing information at national level matters just as much. That includes exchanging emergency response plans, lessons learned from exercises, research findings on CBRN agents and detection methods, and knowledge of forensic awareness at incident scenes. Better methods for analysing forensic evidence help both in managing an incident and in limiting its longer-term effects.

The policy framework for CBRN disaster prevention

The National Policy on Disaster Management 2009 aims to prevent a CBRN disaster from occurring in the first place. Where one does occur, various stakeholders are expected to apply pre-planned structural and non-structural measures to limit the consequences for health, life and the environment, and to restore degraded environmental resources afterwards.

Even careful planning can fail in a real situation, because both predictable surprises and improbable scenarios keep emerging. The biggest practical challenge in a mass casualty incident is that resources are overwhelmed and national capacity is stretched to its limit, with rehabilitation and recovery still to follow.

The conclusion the authors reach

Prevention and protection work when they are integrated: monitoring and surveillance systems in place, preparedness raised, mitigation skills practised, and capacity development and training treated as continuing work rather than one-off events. That combination is what makes a safer India, and a safer world.

CDPRR applies this through its CBRN training modules, its risk assessment and mapping work and its capacity-building workshops. Related reading on this site includes radiological terrorism and a case study of the Mumbai Port Trust chlorine leak.

India’s national guidelines are published by the National Disaster Management Authority.

(Read the full paper in PDF format)