Bhopal disaster (opens in new tab)

The USSR was responsible for Chernobyl disaster and with the cold war still running, it was a candy for the western media.

In case of the Bhopal disaster, an american owned company was to blame and happened in a non threathening third world country. No news for western media.

I believe that is because conceptually, radiation is such a foreign concept to people. Who can blame them, they only hear it in the context of danger (for example, when getting an x-ray) or catastrophe (Chernobyl). But they'll happily eat a banana.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster#Ongoing_contam...

Our family was one of the lucky one that survived with no injuries. It was a cold night and my mother decided to close the windows because she had an itchy throat. My mother suspects the itchy throat was probably the gas (can't say for sure if it is).

My grandfather recalls the next day, when went was out to buy milk in the early morning, having no clue as to what had happened the night before. There were dead animals all over the street, and birds were just falling out of the sky. Several of my grandfather's neighbors died, homeless living on the streets and on train and bus stations were dead.

One thing that hasn't been mentioned in this thread yet is that the training for workers at the time of the accident was a small fraction of that originally intended for workers at the plant, and the reason for this was a financial decision taken by plant management under pressure from Union Carbide, not because the training wasn't needed.

A probable cause of the incident was water left in pipes by a worker, ordered by a novice supervisor, washing out a pipe; a process that was prohibited by plant rules. Extensive and repeated training imprints processes & rules into people's minds. If that action was the cause then with better training, both worker and supervisor would have known not to do this.

So 'maybe it was sabotage' seems corporate blame shifting. It was somewhat unclear exactly how anything in there happened. That was their problem. It was only a matter of time before an accident happened.

Yes Union Carbide were criminally negligent, but justice and truth must be respected, regardless of how much people love stories about evil corporations.

50% of the plant was owned by Indian banks and the Government, and Indian courts jailed 7 Indian nationals for various failings related to this. Which country exactly are you expecting is meant to be picking up the slack here?

Once you eliminate the chemical companies running the Haber-Bosch process, you can also dispose of the nukes by using them to put starving billions out of misery.