Tactical, Technical and Legal Aspects of Counteracting CBRN Threats in the Light of the Tasks of Crisis Management Teams

Chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) agents constitute one of the most serious contemporary threats to public safety, particularly during mass events and public gatherings, where large numbers of people are concentrated in a limited space. This article integrates the tactical-technical and the legal-institutional dimensions of counteracting such threats, examined through the prism of the statutory tasks of crisis-management teams (Zespoły Zarządzania Kryzysowego). The first part characterises the four categories of weapons of mass destruction, classifies toxic warfare agents by their mode of action, and reviews the parameters and categories of detection and identification devices. The second part reconstructs the legal framework: the international conventions prohibiting chemical and biological weapons, and the Polish crisis-management system, whose architecture has been substantially reshaped since 2021. The analysis accounts for the 2024 Act on the protection of the population and civil defence, the 2024 regulation on contamination-detection systems, and, above all, the 2026 amendment to the Act on crisis management, which replaces the National Security Threat Report with a National Risk Assessment and splits the single crisis-management plan into risk-management and crisis-response plans. The method is a critical analysis of subject literature and normative sources. The study concludes that the principal capability gap lies not in the availability of individual devices or legal instruments, but in integrating detection, mass decontamination, and information flow into a single, exercised procedure at the crisis-management system level.