THIS month, the remaining survivors of the Bhopal tragedy in India will begin a class action lawsuit in the US against the plant's former owners, Union Carbide.
And about time, too. For 15 years, the company has avoided court action at home for the world's worst industrial accident. The reason's obvious: if a US court rules that faulty plant design led to the 16 000 deaths that are so far estimated to have resulted from the chemical explosion, Union Carbide will have to pay a lot more than the begging-bowl sums it doled out in India. The company helped keep the case out of the US by saying how the tragedy was caused by industrial sabotage. But this is beside the point.
On the morning of 3 December 1984, when they started dying in Bhopal, I was in my office in Geneva. I called the company and then every chemical ...
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