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Interview With Mr. Ake Bovallius, Chairman Of The 6th CBW Protection Symposium
The 6th International Symposium on protection against chemical and biological warfare agents, organised by seven Swedish authorities and one international organisation, is being held in Stockholm on 10-15 May, 1998. The Symposium traditionally provides a "window" on the latest developments to face the CBW threat.
MT spoke to the Symposium's Chairman to provide an overview of the current situation and the steps ahead.
MT: What are the goals and aims of the CBW Protection Symposium? What results were achieved in the past five editions?
Bovallius: Sweden has been arranging this series of symposia every third year since 1983, and it has grown to be the largest CBW protection event in the world. Our goal was, and is "to create an interdisciplinary forum for the mutual exchange of information regarding protection against chemical and biological warfare agents," and I think we can confidently claim having achieved it.
The first four symposia in the series were limited to chemical weapons protection. We included biological protection since the 1995 symposium, both because we feel that many protection areas are similar or actually the same, and because today there is a broadened threat spectrum with many possible agents in between the classical BW and CW categories. Toxins are an example of that; by definition they belong to the chemical weapons, but from the protection and detection point of view toxins have more similarities with biological weapons.
MT: Swedish troops were fortunately never subjected to CBW attacks, and Sweden is not known to have ever developed or stockpiled CB weapons. What is, then, the rationale for the Swedish interest in these matters?
Bovallius: Of course, we in Sweden have never had any offensive CBW ambitions. We have always been a nonaligned country, and when we started this series of symposia we were placed geographically between the NATO and the Warsaw Pact areas. This implies that beside guaranteeing our defence against a conventional attack, we also have to be prepared to protect ourselves from weapons of mass destruction. Accordingly, in addition to protection for the military forces, we also have tried to built up a protection for the civil population, that of course would be affected by a...