Detroit: ‘The Pinto leaves you with that warm feeling’
On 28 May 1972, Lilly Gray paid dearly for buying American. On that day, accompanied by thirteen-year-old Richard Grimshaw, she was driving from Anaheim to Barstow, in Southern California. As she approached her exit on Interstate 15, she encountered heavy traffic, prompting her to decelerate. This caused the carburettor on her new Ford Pinto to malfunction, with the result that the engine stalled and the car coasted to a halt. The vehicle immediately behind the Pinto swerved, but the next car could not. It collided at a speed of between 28 and 37 miles per hour – not fast, but enough to transform the Pinto into a fireball. Lilly Gray died of severe burns a few days later. Richard Grimshaw miraculously survived, but required sixty-eight operations over ten years, and was left permanently disfigured.
The Gray/Grimshaw case was important because it was commonplace. Exploding Pintos seemed a frequent occurrence in the early 1970s, the result of a design fault that rendered the car vulnerable in rear-end collisions, even at low speeds. As fatal accidents and product liability suits mounted, J. Walter Thompson, Ford’s ad agency, revised the car’s campaign, removing the sentence ‘Pinto leaves you with that warm feeling’.
The Pinto was Ford’s answer to the Volkswagen Beetle, an attempt to make inroads into the subcompact market, heretofore dominated by European and Japanese manufacturers. Throughout the 1960s, Detroit had confidently assumed that Americans would always want large cars, equipped with gas-guzzling V-6 and V-8 engines. By the end of the decade, however, it became apparent that the market for compacts was growing. The shift was influenced partly by reasons of economy, but also by the success of the environmental movement in drawing attention to air pollution. Detroit, however, had difficulty responding quickly, given the considerable time necessary to design and develop new models.
Into the breach stepped Lee Iacocca, whose reputation at Ford had been enhanced by the enormous popularity of the sporty Mustang. Widely seen as a man with a Midas touch, he used his influence in 1968 to push for a subcompact. In his characteristically swashbuckling way, Iacocca demanded that the model be ready for the 1971 market, due to hit the showrooms in August 1970. That left just twenty-five months to develop the car, half the time usually necessary.
Iacocca wanted a car weighing less than 2,000 pounds and costing less than $2,000. The truncated development time meant that design and tooling had to be carried out simultaneously, rather than as part of an organic process. This meant that faults revealed during testing could not easily be corrected because tooling specifications were already set in stone.
Due to the rushed schedule, the Pinto that emerged was a four-wheeled bucket of trouble. Among its problems were a tendency to stall, gear slippage, sluggishness and poor fuel consumption. Most of these, however, fell into the category of annoying rather than dangerous. Not so the fuel tank. In most small cars, due to the truncated rear end, the tank is placed over the rear axle. The particular shape of the Pinto, however, meant that this would result in an unacceptably small cargo space, so it was pushed further back, less than ten inches from the flimsy rear bumper, in truth just a chrome strip. When it was pointed out that the design increased the risk of fire, a Ford engineer remarked: ‘That’s all true. But you miss the point entirely. You see, safety isn’t the issue, trunk space is. You have no idea how stiff the competition is over trunk space. Do you realize that if we put a [safer] tank in the Pinto you could only get one set of golf clubs in the trunk?’1
All this meant that, in a rear-end collision caused by a car travelling at just 20 miles per hour, the Pinto’s fuel tank would be pushed forward, into four sharp bolts protruding from the differential. Since that would almost inevitably mean rupture, all that was needed was a spark to produce an inferno. In 1977, the auto safety expert Byron Bloch, after a meticulous study of the fuel tank, concluded: ‘It’s a catastrophic blunder . . . Ford made an extremely irresponsible decision when they placed such a weak tank in such a ridiculous location in such a soft rear end. It’s almost designed to blow up – premeditated.’ Tests prior to the release of the model had uncovered the problem, but a re-design was vetoed due to the tight schedule. Asked whether these concerns were communicated to Iacocca, an engineer replied ‘Hell no . . . That person would have been fired. Safety wasn’t a popular subject around Ford in those days. With Lee it was taboo. Whenever a problem was raised that meant a delay on the Pinto, Lee would chomp on his cigar, look out the window and say “Read the product objectives and get back to work.”’ One industry executive assumed that concern about auto safety was like ‘a hula hoop, a fad that will pass’.2
In truth, senior management was eventually alerted to the problem, but the holy writ of cost-benefit analysis dictated that it should be ignored. A number of low-cost solutions were available, among them inserting a rubber bladder into the fuel tank, or placing a plastic baffle between the tank and the differential housing. For the investment of less than $20 per car, the Pinto could have been rendered safe in collisions up to 45 miles per hour, thus exceeding safety standards. Indeed, investigation by Ford eventually revealed that calamities like the one that killed Lilly Gray could have been avoided at the cost of just $5.08 per car. While design changes were initially rejected because of the need to get the Pinto in the showrooms by August 1970, in the long run Ford decided that, all things considered, a dangerous car promised more profits than a safe one.
Despite murmurings that the car was a lemon, the Pinto proved immensely popular. Americans wanted to buy domestic, and, given the opportunity, they did so. Sales were helped enormously when the Arab oil boycott, which began in October 1973, introduced Americans to the new phenomena of limited fuel supplies and higher cost. The frequency of fiery collisions nevertheless did not escape notice. Among the first to cause a stir was the consumer advocate Ralph Nader, followed closely by investigative journalists at Mother Jones magazine. Their exposé, published in August 1977, claimed that as many as 900 people had been killed in fires resulting from the defective fuel tank. Evidence then surfaced that Ford executives had made a conscious decision not to repair the fault. That story was taken up by Mike Wallace of CBS’s 60 Minutes. Keen on controversy, he exaggerated the casualty figures, confessing that he found it ‘difficult to believe that top management at the Ford Motor Company [could] . . . sit there and say, “Oh, we’ll buy 2,000 deaths, 10,000 injuries, because we want to make some money or we want to bring in a cheaper car.”’3
All this negative publicity occurred simultaneously to the much-publicized Grimshaw case. That case hung on an internal Ford memo calculating that the risk of fuel tank fires could be reduced with the introduction of modifications costing $11 per vehicle. Such a modification, if introduced in 12.5 million vehicles, would cost Ford $137 million dollars. The memo further calculated that 180 fatalities and a similar number of serious burn injuries could be avoided as a result of the modification. Assuming a ‘value per life’ figure of $200,000 and per injury of $67,000, the company concluded that the total cost of not modifying the cars would be $49.5 million, or a savings of $87.5 million. The well-known trial lawyer Stuart Speiser called the memo ‘possibly the most remarkable document ever produced in an American lawsuit’.4
On the strength of that powerful piece of evidence, the jury awarded the Gray family wrongful death damages of $560,000, while Grimshaw was given $2.5 million in compensatory damages and $125 million in punitive damages. The punitive damages award was later reduced by the judge to $3.5 million, but that still underlined Ford’s faulty calculations of the value of human life.
Amidst the uproar over Ford’s brutal pragmatism, nearly everyone missed the real story. Eventually, a powerful myth arose about the unique danger of the Pinto, which clouded the issue of Ford’s liability and obscured a more general problem pertaining to the decline of the American auto industry. The notorious memo, it turns out, pertained not to the Pinto but to all Ford cars sold in a given year, and actually dealt with the risk of fire caused by rollover, not rear-end collision. Furthermore, the figure of $200,000 per life was not Ford’s calculation but that devised by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for determining the cost of motor vehicle accidents.
It also transpired that Pinto fires resulted in not ‘thousands’ of deaths, but just twenty-seven in the years 1971 to 1977. Even that much reduced figure was probably an exaggeration given that it would have included high speed collisions, in other words, fatalities which would have resulted even if the fuel tank had been safer. Statistics eventually released by the Fatal Accident Reporting System (FARS) showed that the Pinto was in line with the national average in the frequency of fatal fires, though it was admittedly over double the average in fatal fires caused by rear-end collision.
The court in the Grimshaw case decided that ‘Ford’s institutional mentality was shown to be one of callous indifference to public safety.’ That judgement harmonized with populist assumptions about the rapaciousness of corporate America. In fact, however, Ford’s real error lay not in the application of cost-benefit analysis to human lives, but rather in allowing that analysis to enter the public domain, where it was judged by those unable to understand it. Every manufacturer makes similar calculations in designing products. As the Mother Jones article admitted, ‘cost-valuing human life is not used by Ford alone . . . The process of wilfully trading lives for profits is built into corporate capitalism.’ If the auto industry did not apply considerations of this sort, they would make tanks, not cars. Only a virtually indestructible car can avoid fatalities and a product liability case. Unfortunately, an indestructible car is also unaffordable. One of the reasons Americans got unsafe Pintos was because they demanded cheap cars.5
That, however, was not how Americans interpreted the scandal. Thanks to Mother Jones, Nader, Wallace and all the other critics eager to pour scorn, Americans blissfully assumed that the problem was exclusive to the Pinto and that, otherwise, nothing was rotten in the state of Michigan. In fact, during the Seventies the American car industry reached rock bottom. In terms of safety (or lack of it) the Pinto was about equal to its rivals, the Chevrolet Vega and the AMC Gremlin. In 1980, the NHTSA reported that ten out of twelve small cars failed basic safety standards when they crashed into a wall at 35 m.p.h. Bigger cars like the Mercury Monarch or Buick LeSabre were safer, but they were still dogs to drive. While America had demon-stated her technological prowess by landing on the moon, she had somehow forgotten how to make cars.6
The Japanese and the Europeans, on the other hand, had shown that they were rather good at building cars. By the end of the decade, around 30 per cent of the vehicles on American roads were foreign, an astonishing figure in a country where patriotism still influenced choice. Americans wanted to buy American cars, but Detroit was failing to provide what customers wanted. The industy’s biggest failure came in its inadequate response to the Arab oil boycott and the cutting off of Iranian oil in 1978, both of which caused the demand for small cars to increase. Granted, part of the fault must go to the American government for preventing fuel prices from rising to their appropriate level, thus encouraging a dangerous complacency which prevails to this day. As Transportation Secretary Neil Goldschmidt complained in 1980, ‘the U.S. Government allowed us to go from a nation importing a third of its oil to one importing almost 50 percent because there wasn’t the political courage to deregulate the price of oil’.7
The main problem, however, was that Detroit failed to provide adequate choice when it came to fuel-efficient cars. Instead of responding to public demand, the auto industry concentrated on preserving the big car market by lobbying government to keep fuel prices low and by fighting the imposition of fuel efficiency and clean air standards. Industry executives assumed that the fad for small cars would pass and that the American demand for gas-guzzling behemoths would recover. While that proved a correct assumption in the long run, Detroit miscalculated the time necessary for that recovery to take place.
As a result, the car industry found itself on the brink of collapse by the end of the decade. Sales fell from 9.3 million in 1978 to just over 7 million in 1980. The bad news was dominated by Chrysler, which lost $2 billion in 18 months, in the process setting a record for the largest losses by any company in American history. The federal government was forced to step in with a $1.5 billion rescue package. That catastrophe obscured the serious problems of the other two major car manufacturers. In its North American market, Ford lost around $2 billion in 1980, while once mighty General Motors found itself in the red that year, the first time that had happened since 1921. The slump saw nearly 300,000 industry workers laid off, nearly a dozen plants closed and almost 1,500 dealerships shut.
The crisis was serious because of the central importance of the car to American culture. No other society was as dependent on automobiles, which made the failure of the industry to provide the cars Americans wanted all the more pathetic. The industry eventually responded by imitating the Japanese. Detroit began producing more and better small cars, but, more importantly, applied techniques perfected by Toyota and Datsun to the assembly line methods once synonymous with Henry Ford. In real terms, this increasingly meant that robots were building cars.
Efficiency measures eventually allowed a miraculous recovery in the 1980s. But just as the burning Pinto obscured the real problem of the auto industry in the 1970s, so too the dramatic recovery of Chrysler in the subsequent decade (a recovery engineered, ironically, by Iacocca) obscured much more serious problems in American transportation policy. The American love affair with the car remained a constant, and that meant a dangerous addiction to petroleum that the government was loath to address. ‘Sometimes I feel like . . . there is no way you can change the . . . way people live,’ one woman confessed. ‘You can’t just say look, you have to wake up and realize that you can’t waste any more energy. You can’t just drive your car to work everyday. People feel they deserve to be able to live this way. That they have worked hard to be able to live this way . . . I don’t know if it will ever change.’ That proved an accurate assessment, especially at a time when the government proved unwilling to make courageous decisions. When the oil supply recovered, so too did the American fondness for big cars. That fondness eventually led to the ridiculous epidemic of the SUV. The smoke from the Pinto fire obscured some painful truths about Americans and their cars. As it turned out, the real problem for America was not the few cars that exploded, but the millions that did not.8
In the beginning there was Bob. So goes the narrative popular within human fertility circles. Bob Edwards was a geneticist who believed that, under the right circumstances, a human egg could be fertilized outside the body and then re-introduced into the uterus of a woman, where it could develop to full maturity. That possibility provided immense hope to thousands of women who were infertile due to damaged Fallopian tubes. ‘It was about more than infertility,’ Edwards later remarked. ‘It was also about issues like . . . the ethics of human conception. I wanted to find out exactly who was in charge, whether it was God Himself or whether it was scientists in the laboratory.’9
The first known case of embryo transplantation occurred in 1891, when Professor Walter Heape at the University of Cambridge harvested embryos from an angora rabbit and inserted them in the uterus of a recently mated Belgian hare. The resultant litter consisted of four Belgians and two angoras. That outcome set the tone for research in this field: scientists had repeatedly to answer complaints that they were tampering with nature. Nevertheless, when applied to humans, Heape’s breakthrough seemed more than just the macabre fantasy of a mad scientist. Research was driven by the grief of millions of childless couples who just wanted a baby. ‘Infertility is a disease, it is a real disease,’ the fertility expert Jamie Grifo has remarked. ‘It is a horrible disease and unless you have it, you don’t know what it is like to have it . . . to have a child is not a cosmetic thing. It is a very important basic life event.’ The dreaded word in gynaecological clinics was ‘never’. As Patrick Steptoe recalled, ‘That verdict of “never”, though softly spoken, leaves the woman shaking, empty, her face too naked, her private grief too unconcealed. That word “never” is one I have heard . . . too often over the years. I have had to say it myself. Many times.’10
Salvation would come if Heape’s research could be extended to a point where human embryos could be fertilized outside the body, allowed to mature, and then introduced into the uterus, to grow to full term. Among the pioneers was Dr Landrum Shettles, a maverick gynaecologist at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York. He tried to force the pace of research in the 1960s, but was stopped by administrators who feared that his work would attract adverse attention and deter charitable funding. In truth, his limited understanding of cell biology would have proved a greater obstacle than the qualms of his administrators. Stated simply, he was a doctor, not a geneticist. Edwards, who first became interested in the topic in 1958, understood the science of reproduction intimately, and had managed to fertilize the embryos of rats, mice and rabbits outside the womb. He spent most of the 1960s trying to duplicate this success with humans, but failure proved persistent.
A breakthrough came in 1967 when Edwards happened across an article by Steptoe in the Lancet, discussing the potential for laparoscopy as a method for examining a woman’s reproductive organs. The article mentioned that the laparoscope allowed access to the oviducts, which thrilled Edwards, since it suggested that egg collection could become easier. Gynaecologists warned that laparoscopy was dangerous, and Steptoe equally so, but Edwards ignored that advice. ‘I needed Steptoe and Steptoe needed me,’ he later admitted. The two had little in common – Steptoe was urbane, aloof, conservative and middle class; Edwards abrupt, fiercely socialist and decidedly working class. Their equally large egos did not bode well for working together, but they decided early on that their work was far too important to let personalities obstruct it. ‘I can be damn difficult on occasions,’ Edwards admitted. ‘And I know Patrick could be difficult . . . we were probably both little prima donnas in our own way, but if there was any argument . . . we always went into a room together and sorted [it] out and agreed on what we would do.’ For Edwards, working with Steptoe provided a direct connection to the human side of his research. ‘It was Steptoe who really wetted me in to thinking like a doctor . . . They had a different outlook. They had a different ethics and I was learning fast, I was learning very fast.’11
The two explorers had to struggle against a crowd of colleagues willing them to fail, not to mention journalists who craved stories of science gone mad. ‘The test tube time bomb is ticking away,’ wrote William Breckon, who predicted ‘shattering – and frightening – possibilities . . . among them, the possibility of producing hundreds of identical living organisms from just a single living organism’. In fact, for the first five years, obstacles proved more prominent than possibilities. Repeated failure demoralized the team and bolstered the legions of doubters. The problem of fertilizing an egg in vitro was quickly solved, as was that of keeping the fertilized egg alive to the point when it would, under normal circumstances, lodge itself in the uterus. The difficulty, however, lay in implantation. The first attempt in 1972 failed, as did every subsequent effort over the next three years. Implanted embryos invariably aborted well before the end of the first trimester. ‘It was very hard to keep people’s spirits up over such a length of time,’ Muriel Harris, a senior member of the nursing team, recalled.12
An application for a major grant was rejected by the Medical Research Council because of ‘serious doubts about ethical aspects’. The team nevertheless struggled on, thanks to the generosity of sympathetic colleagues and funding provided by an American philanthropist. The work was made all the more complex because Edwards was based in Cambridge and Steptoe in Oldham, a two-hour drive away. Since Steptoe supplied the patients, that meant Edwards did the commuting. In an attempt to ease the pressure, Edwards helped Steptoe get a position at Newmarket General Hospital, just fifteen minutes from Cambridge, but the Medical Research Council vetoed the move on the grounds that laparoscopy was dangerous and in vitro fertilization held no promise. As a result, Edwards, who was so desperate to give parents the opportunity to have a child, had little time to spend with his own children. His schedule was determined entirely by the fertility cycles of Steptoe’s patients. ‘All too often I would see [my wife’s] face cloud over as I had to disappoint the children or to cancel a party, a theatre outing, a dinner, at the last moment.’13
By 1977, it seemed that every option had been tried, yet success still proved elusive. More than simply an experiment falling short, each failure meant that a couple desperate for a child was left devastated. ‘I had been frank with them all,’ recalled Steptoe. ‘They all knew that our approach was novel and unpredictable. But of course it did not help them when our method failed. We had to be successful. For their sake.’ The next patient chosen, Lesley Brown, was a working-class woman from the Oldham area whose chances of conceiving were nil, since her Fallopian tubes had been removed. The team went back to basics. Instead of stimulating the production of eggs with hormones, they aspirated a single egg during her natural menstrual cycle. Edwards took it to Cambridge, where conception took place, then drove it back to Oldham. Departing from earlier practice, the team decided to return the fertilized embryo to the uterus earlier – at the eight-cell stage. ‘That was a wonderful experience,’ Brown exclaimed when her uncomfortable operation was completed. ‘As soon as [it] was implanted, I felt as if I was in a cocoon,’ she recalled. ‘I was warm and comfortable, and I was sure. I always thought it would work.’14
From that point forward the pregnancy proved normal, but for relentless monitoring. Success seemed likely, yet the team had to keep quiet until the baby was born. At the back of everyone’s minds was the possibility of some horrible deformity which would inevitably be blamed on the manner of conception. The Nobel laureate Max Perutz had warned of ‘a new thalidomide catastrophe’. The press, alerted to the successful conception, circled the hospital like ravenous vultures. Payments were offered to hospital employees willing to divulge secrets. Some found the temptation too great, but Steptoe somehow managed to protect Brown’s privacy.15
In the final weeks of the pregnancy, Brown developed toxcaemia, a not uncommon problem, but one which implied delivery by Caesarean section. The operation was carried out by Steptoe on 25 July 1978. ‘Left hand under the buttocks and out she came,’ he later wrote. ‘Glorious. She was chubby, full of muscular tone . . . I held the head low and we sucked and cleared the mouth and throat. She took a deep breath. Then she yelled and yelled and yelled. I laid her down, all pink and furious, and saw at once that she was externally perfect and beautiful.’ Reporters gathered in their hundreds outside the Oldham hospital. Steptoe’s announcement was revolutionary because of its simplicity: ‘All examinations showed that the baby is quite normal.’ Baby Louise was a miracle for her parents and a gift of hope for the rest of the world. Edwards announced what so many couples were desperate to hear: ‘This work may be developed in other respects. It may include the reversal of sterilization.’16
Louise Brown was probably the first working-class child famous just for being born. Her face was on the cover of virtually every newspaper and magazine around the world. ‘How would you like to be the world’s first test tube baby?’ Johnny Carson asked in his opening monologue the day the news broke. ‘What do you do on Father’s day? Do you send a card to the Dupont Corporation? I understand that after the baby was conceived in the laboratory, a pair of beakers smoked a cigarette and stared at the ceiling!’ Amid all the celebration, however, niggling doubts remained. Should man be tampering with conception? Was it morally wrong? Where would it lead?17
Steptoe and Edwards had broken the link between procreation and reproduction, a connection which seemed inviolate. They had literally made a human being. Something that was once sacred and mysterious had been reduced to a laboratory procedure and, worse, to a process able to be manipulated according to the whims of man. The next logical step was what seemed so frightening. The ability to manipulate procreation might lead to manipulating it for specific purpose – to make a better baby, or to avoid a flawed one. Edwards and Steptoe had celebrated Louise Brown as a solution to infertility, but was she also a harbinger of eugenics? When procreation becomes a process, do babies become a product to which quality standards can be applied?
Critics warned that a Pandora’s Box had been opened. ‘I have grave misgivings about the possible implications,’ remarked the Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh, Cardinal Gordon Gray. The Vatican warned that Louise’s birth would ‘have very grave consequences for humanity’. Quite a few critics objected to the manner in which the sperm was harvested – namely by masturbation. From various quarters came muttered hopes for horrible problems so that the perpetrators of this gross experiment would learn not to tamper with nature. Some labelled Edwards the anti-Christ. Even James Watson, who helped unravel the mystery of DNA, argued that science had gone too far. Journalists, never given to celebration, were determined instead to explore the moral minefield, and did not lack for experts willing to stoke doubt. Martin Johnson, one of Edwards’ research students, recalls a seemingly endless stream of phone calls from journalists who probed breaches in the team’s moral defences. ‘It was our little group against the world.’18
Unease was focused on two distinct implications: the first that embryo research would lead to cloning; the second that, in the process of research and treatment, fertilized embryos would be destroyed. The latter inspired renewed debate on the question of when life begins. Steptoe and Edwards had anticipated the outcry by bringing theologians and moral philosophers onto their team. What took them by surprise, however, was the venom with which criticism was delivered. That was all the more hurtful because they were utterly convinced that they were doing good. The theologian Gordon Dunstan, who helped Edwards prepare his defence, recalled him asking, after one particularly malicious attack: ‘Why does he hate me so, he doesn’t know what I do?’19
In response to critics who warned about where this research might lead, Steptoe argued that to stop the work because of a preoccupation with theoretical consequences would have been like stopping the Wright Brothers because their research might make aerial bombing possible. He kept repeating that he was interested only in allowing infertile women to have a baby. Lending support was Bishop Gordon Roe, who argued, with impeccable logic, that ‘if the intent is . . . to help women to have babies . . . it can only be conformity with God’s will because God in the first place created human beings to have children, to multiply and so on’. Steptoe came to a similar conclusion. Just before his death, he spoke with Roe about miracles and asked: ‘Am I being presumptive in saying that miracles do still happen, that they work through the hands of people like me?’ Roe concluded that it was entirely appropriate to think in such terms, that the team were ‘assisting in God’s creation, rather than interfering with it’.20
That same rationale was voiced by Georgeanna Jones, who reassured her husband: ‘You must remember we are just helping, we are not doing anything that God himself isn’t doing, we are his helper.’ They found out about Louise Brown while moving into their retirement home in Norfolk, Virginia. As the most highly respected authorities on in vitro fertilization in America, they were naturally the first point of contact for inquisitive reporters. When asked if the same success could be achieved in America, Howard Jones replied: ‘Yes, of course.’ Could it be achieved in Norfolk? ‘Yes.’ What would you need? ‘Money,’ he replied. The next day came a call from an eager benefactor. ‘How much do you want?’ ‘That was the first time in our entire professional career we had ever been asked how much money we wanted,’ Jones reflected. The Joneses had not intended to open an in vitro fertilization clinic in Norfolk, but that is where the tide of events took them.21
The money was important because the outrage was greater in the United States than in Britain. That outrage made it difficult for legislators to pledge government funding. Eventually, the government, especially after Ronald Reagan became president, took the view that it would not block research, as long as it was funded privately. That had the unanticipated and rather sordid effect of turning fertility assistance into a business with profits a prime concern. ‘The technology quickly fell into a corporate ethos,’ Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics, remarks. ‘It became something that was heavily marketed. It became something that was advertised, even for a time, with what I would describe as false advertising. People would say “We’ll get you a baby” but they wouldn’t say what their success rate was, or they wouldn’t admit that they had a lot of failures.’ American fertility experts who worried about government interference eventually found that their real problem was corporate interference.22
The day after Louise Brown’s birth, enquiries from childless couples flooded into the offices of Steptoe and Edwards. They decided to form their own clinic, Bourn Hall, devoted to full-time research. Britain would remain the leader in this field, but successes would eventually occur around the world, because demand was universal. In time, the overwhelming support of ordinary people smothered the doubts of moral critics. Anti-abortionists had difficulty mustering opposition to a procedure so undeniably pro-life. ‘No one, to my knowledge, has ever demonstrated, picketed, chained themselves to the doorway of an in vitro fertilization clinic,’ remarks Caplan. The consensus held that while government should put obstacles in the way of cloning, it should not interfere with IVF.23
‘This is life itself,’ Edwards feels. ‘When a baby is born, you have organised it all. That’s a hell of an achievement . . . It’s the magic of birth. The whole thing is incredible . . . just think of what it means to people. It’s fantastic.’ For those who benefited from the treatment, the personal bond with the IVF doctor seems more important than the sophisticated science. ‘I remember women crying on the wards. The tears were awful,’ Fiona Drewe, who had two boys through IVF, recalled. ‘For some of the women, nothing could be done. But Patrick Steptoe was so sympathetic, and he never did it for the money.’ Many children came to see their IVF doctor as an honorary grandparent. ‘When dad told me Mr Steptoe had passed away, I broke down,’ Louise Brown recalled. ‘It was like losing a dear member of the family.’ Writing in the New York Times on the death of Georgeanna Jones in 2005, Elizabeth Carr, America’s first test tube baby, remarked: ‘She wasn’t special because she helped develop a reproductive technology. She was special because she helped my parents have me.’24
Cape Canaveral: Shuttle to Nowhere
The eminent physicist Ralph Lapp, a Manhattan Project veteran, was no great admirer of the Apollo mission. While Neil Armstrong and his crew were travelling to the moon in 1969, Lapp wrote that he and his fellow scientists were looking forward to a time when NASA might ‘wind up its manned space spectaculars and get on with the job of promoting space science’. Apollo, he reminded readers, cost $25 billion. ‘Yet manned space flights will have given scientists very little information about space. Man, himself, has been the main experiment. And man is the principal reason why Project Apollo has cost so much money.’ He hoped that, on completion of the mission, President Nixon would say to NASA: ‘In the name of all the people on this planet . . . I declare the senseless space race ended. And now, gentlemen, let us point our science and technology in the direction of man.’25
Lapp was no crank. His view was shared by a significant proportion of the scientific community, including a number of Nobel Prize winners. Many scientists objected to the way their budgets had been bled in order to fund a pointless race to the moon. While that race was being run, however, their protests were shouted into a vacuum. The mood changed when Apollo 11 splashed down. Since being first to the moon was the whole point, most Americans felt that no sequel was required. As the veteran news correspondent Eric Severeid accurately predicted: ‘future flights will seem anti-climactic . . . and the pressure to divert these great sums of money to inner space, terra firma and inner man will steadily grow’.26
This attitude worried NASA. The agency understood that, unless it could produce a new goal to replace the moon, mediocrity threatened. NASA’s role would be reduced to shooting rockets carrying satellites into inner space and perhaps sending the occasional probe to a distant planet. The man in space programme would wither and die, for the simple reason that it had no logic beyond beating the Russians. Yet, as Lapp understood, it was the presence of man in the space equation that had made it possible for NASA to attract big money.
Plagued by this dilemma, the NASA administrator Tom Paine decided, well before Armstrong’s small step, that a new goal was needed, so that Apollo would seem like a beginning, not an end. On the eve of the Apollo 11 launch, he told reporters: ‘While the Moon has been the focus of our efforts, the true goal is far more than being the first to land men on the Moon, as though it were a celestial Mount Everest . . . The real goal is to develop and demonstrate the capability for interplanetary travel.’ The only logical destination was Mars. Paine instructed colleagues to prepare budget proposals on the assumption that a mission to the Red Planet would be launched as early as 1983. As had been the case with the moon, Mars was selected as the next destination not because it had any intrinsic worth, but simply because it was theoretically accessible.27
Paine’s behaviour caused unease in the White House. The Nixon administration, rather like Lapp, was looking forward to clawing back NASA’s huge budget. Nixon insisted that ‘space expenditures must take their proper place within a rigorous system of national priorities’. The administration feared, however, that Nixon might be blackmailed into supporting an ambitious next step during the euphoria that would inevitably follow the moon landing. For this reason, Peter Flanigan, the White House liaison to NASA, told Paine ‘to stop public advocacy of early manned Mars activity’. It was, he complained, ‘causing trouble in Congress and restricting Presidential options’.28
Paine wanted $10 billion as a first instalment on a Mars mission. Robert Mayo, Nixon’s budget director, had in mind a figure closer to $1.5 billion for the fiscal year of 1971, which would rule out anything ambitious. While Paine was effectively quarantined from the Oval Office, he did manage to work the old NASA voodoo on Vice-President Spiro Agnew, who responded by openly advocating a Mars mission during festivities surrounding the Apollo 11 launch. ‘I was surprised at [Agnew’s] obtuseness,’ John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic affairs adviser, recalled. ‘I had been wooed by . . . the Space Administration, but not to the degree to which they had made love to Agnew. He had been their guest of honor at space launchings, tours and dinners, and it seemed to me they had done a superb job of recruiting him to lead this fight to vastly expand their empire and budget.’ On Nixon’s instruction, Ehrlichman summoned Agnew to his office and told the vice-president to keep his mouth shut. ‘There is no money,’ he stressed. ‘The President has already decided that.’29
Mayo thought the Mars proposals proof of NASA’s talent for packaging selfish goals in patriotic wrapping. The goal, he felt, was ‘much more beneficial to the space program than to the nation as a whole’. His report included a devastating critique of manned space travel, arguing that ‘no defined manned project can compete on a cost-return basis with unmanned space flight systems . . . [Manned] missions . . . have little demonstrable economic or social return to atone for their high cost.’ Mayo had also caught on to NASA’s uncanny ability to justify future investment by reference to past expenditure. In other words, a mission to Mars, the agency had argued, would make the investment spent on going to the moon worthwhile. That, Mayo realized, was a clever way of endlessly spending money.
Nixon could not bring himself to be quite as tight-fisted as Mayo advocated. A NASA budget of $3.7 billion was sent to Congress, a figure that ruled out Mars, without insulting NASA. A disgusted Paine warned that ‘manned flight activity [will] end in 1972’. Locked in his world of adventure and fantasy, Paine did not remotely understand that most Americans wanted an even earlier end.
Congress, on the other hand, understood the American mood perfectly. Politicians sensed that while Americans celebrated Apollo 11, taxpayers would not for ever be willing to write blank cheques to NASA. Just after the landing, Gallup found that 53 per cent were opposed to a Mars mission, with 39 per cent in favor. More revealing was a Newsweek survey that showed 56 per cent wanted Nixon to spend less on space, while only 10 per cent wanted him to spend more. Congressman Olin Teague found that, after Apollo 11, ‘the easiest thing on earth to vote against in Congress is the space program. You can vote to kill the whole space program tomorrow, and you won’t get one letter.’30
Congress eventually settled on a budget of $3.269 billion. The budget would hover around that level until the mid-1980s, or, in real terms, one-third of its peak during the glory years of Apollo. In the Senate, Walter Mondale justified the cuts by arguing that ‘It would be unconscionable to embark on a [Mars] project of such staggering cost when many of our citizens are malnourished, when our rivers and lakes are polluted, and when our cities and rural areas are dying. What are our values? What do we think is more important?’ Senator William Fulbright summarized the congressional decision perfectly: ‘We voted for sewers. Certainly sewers are more important than going to the moon.’ Paine could not hide his disgust:
One of the games that some people on the Hill might play would be to say, gee, let’s hit the space program and wipe it out, and keep the sewers and so forth in. The idea was that, well, the reason the country was so crummy was because we went to the moon, and by God, if we had only spent that money on all these other things that we needed to do, then we would have a great country and a crummy space program. Wouldn’t it be better than a great space program and a crummy country? This was the line of reasoning they slipped into.
Despite being hopelessly out of touch, Paine had managed to summarize American opinion perfectly.31
Stuck in his fantasies, Paine tried desperately to revive America’s love affair with space. Shortly after the congressional decision, he organized a conference on the future of space travel, and invited the heroes of the glory days, including Werner von Braun, Arthur C. Clarke and Armstrong. Participants were encouraged to let their imaginations run wild. Paine wanted new rocket engines, new vehicles, and new destinations. He also promised wonderful spin-off technologies, including a rocket plane capable of travelling anywhere on earth in less than an hour, and foods made from fossil fuels which would ‘free . . . man from his 5000 year dependence upon agriculture’. The new NASA, he promised, would be like ‘Nelson’s “Band-of-Brothers” – Sea Rovers – combining the best of naval discipline in some areas with freedom of action of bold buccaneers in others – men who are determined to do their individual and collective best to moving the planet into a better 21st Century’. Paine sent the report to the White House with a request for an immediate meeting. Nixon thanked him and filed the report.
The rock-collecting expeditions to the moon meanwhile continued. It is a measure of the short shelf life of Apollo that most Americans can only remember two missions – the first one and the nearly disastrous third one starring Tom Hanks. There were in fact five others. The later ones included a hugely expensive car that looked a lot like what Fred Flintstone once drove. It was driven for a few hours and then abandoned on the moon, much to the disgust of Americans who could only afford an inflammable Pinto. Apollo 14 is vaguely remembered, if only for a ridiculous stunt performed by golfer/ astronaut Alan Shepard. In a subsequent All in the Family episode, Michael ‘Meathead’ Stivic (Rob Reiner) voiced a common disgust when he remarked: ‘You don’t think we got anything more important to do with twenty billion dollars than to send a guy up to the moon to hit a few golf balls?’ During the next mission, one viewer phoned his local network to suggest that a large rock seen during the transmission should be named in honour of ‘a taxpayer selected at random from the computers of the Internal Revenue Service’.32Before disaster struck on Apollo 13, a scheduled live transmission from the capsule was cancelled by CBS in favour of the Doris Day Show. It was only after an explosion imperilled the crew that Americans started paying attention. Hardly anyone protested when coverage of Apollo 17, the last mission, was cut to a bare minimum. When CBS interrupted its hit show Medical Center to show the launch, viewers jammed telephone lines to complain. ABC shoehorned its coverage into the half time of a New York Jets–Oakland Raiders football game. Instead of showing the final steps of man on the moon, NBC broadcast a repeat of The Tonight Show.33
The waning of public enthusiasm did not stop hard-core space nuts from continuing to dream. Fantasies in fact proved much more exciting than the reality of repetitious lunar missions. Dreams did not need to obey the laws of economics or physics, which perhaps explains the popularity of Star Trek. A common feature among fantasists was the belief that a better life would evolve in space, as if man’s beastliness was determined by gravity. Paine, for instance, insisted that utopia could be built on distant planets. ‘As with the American experience of 1776,’ he argued, ‘founding a new society in a demanding environment will sweep aside old world dogmas, prejudices, outworn traditions, and oppressive ideologies. A modern frontier brotherhood will develop as the new society works together to tame its underdeveloped planet for posterity.’34
Gerard O’Neill, the popular space guru, thought that a perfect life could be realized in a space station, endlessly spinning in the ether. Space stations would bring ‘perpetual plenty’, thus solving the population crisis, the energy problem, poverty and even war itself. The first step toward this Utopia was a cosmic cruise liner he called Island One, which could supposedly be up and running before the end of the twentieth century, at a cost of only $31 billion. ‘With an abundance of food and clean electrical energy, controlled climates and temperate weather, living conditions . . . should be much more pleasant than in most places on earth.’ The station would be like ‘a small, wealthy resort community on Earth: good restaurants, cinemas, libraries, perhaps small discotheques’. Playing to the environmental movement, he presented Island One as an eco-commune which would relieve pressure on Mother Earth. By 2050, he predicted, more people would be living in space than on terra firma. The planet could then recover from man’s depredations, returning to a state of pastoral virginity. Fans of O’Neill shouted: ‘Declare the Earth a wilderness area: if you love it, leave it.’35
A space station, or a ship capable of going to Mars, could not simply be placed on top of a Saturn V rocket and blasted into space, as had been the case with Apollo. Something that size would instead have to be constructed in orbit by astronauts bolting components together. O’Neill projected that hundreds of separate trips into near space would be necessary to construct Island One. Likewise, even the more modest ideas of Paine implied a schedule of flights that dwarfed Apollo. That kind of effort would be wasteful, costly and time-consuming if components were flown skyward in a disposable rocket like Saturn V. Much more sensible, it seemed, would be a reusable space ferry.
From this seed of fantasy, the idea of the Space Transportation System – commonly known as the Shuttle – grew. NASA loved the idea because it seemed a good way to keep manned space travel alive. Since something like a Shuttle was the necessary prelude to an ambitious mission to Mars or beyond, it seemed a step in the right direction. Nixon liked the idea for similar reasons. The president wanted to cut NASA’s budget, but he did not want to surrender manned space spectaculars to the Soviets. He understood that, in order to remain interesting, space had to have a face.
The president and NASA therefore willingly colluded in a conspiracy to convince themselves, and the rest of the world, that the Shuttle was sensible. On the surface, the logic of a reusable spacecraft would seem unassailable. But the complicating factor was the crew. As Mayo and Lapp understood, the presence of human beings made spaceflight infinitely more complex and hugely more expensive. In a straightforward comparison, an unmanned disposable rocket would always be cheaper. In order to make the project seem a bargain, NASA had to exaggerate the importance of man in the equation, and (in order to create an economy of scale) inflate the frequency of missions. To this end, NASA forecast 779 launches between 1978 and 1991, or more than 5 a month. At that rate, the total cost would be $50 billion, or $16 billion cheaper than the same number of flights with expendable rockets. But, critics asked, why were so many missions necessary if there were no plans to go to Mars? NASA replied that space needs would inevitably increase and that, in any case, surplus cargo room could be sold to private companies or to other nations, thus reducing the cost further. Besides (and this was said in a whisper), the military potential was enormous. Finally, the Shuttle was said to be essential to the construction of a space station, another example of NASA using one white elephant to justify the purchase of another.
The Shuttle sales pitch was based on the idea of space travel becoming mundane. ‘Toward the end of the Seventies,’ von Braun boasted, ‘you will no longer have to go through gruelling years of astronaut training if you want to go into orbit. A reusable space shuttle will take you up there in the comfort of an airliner.’ The use of the pronoun ‘you’ was intentional; space would be democratized. Congress, however, still baulked. Mondale and other critics quoted space heavyweights like James Van Allen, who was adamant that the US did not need a Shuttle. In order to gain congressional approval, NASA revised the plans in a way that cut the initial cost from $14 billion to $5.15 billion. ‘That was one of the greatest mistakes,’ an agency scientist later admitted. Reducing the cost had inevitable consequences for reusability and therefore profitability. In short, while the craft itself was cheaper, each mission became more expensive and the pre-flight preparation more complicated, rendering weekly missions pie in the sky. Out went the basic premise that a Shuttle would be cheaper than a disposable rocket, on which the entire project rested. But no one at NASA admitted that at the time. ‘Every now and then I go back and look at those early projections and I have to close my eyes and shake my head,’ the Shuttle planner Michael Weeks later confessed.36
As it turned out, the Shuttle was NASA’s Pinto – badly designed and very dangerous. Two Shuttles have been lost, and fourteen crewmembers killed. Unlike the Pinto, however, the Shuttle is far from cheap. In 1993, a single launch cost $547 million, $180 million more than NASA had projected. Nor have the flights been nearly as frequent as NASA promised. Instead of 779 launches by 1992, NASA has managed just 124 by the end of 2008. The cost and unreliability have frightened away customers. In fact, the US has been placed in the embarrassing position of having to explain why countries wishing to put satellites in orbit often prefer the Russian or European space agencies.
‘Apollo was a matter of going to the moon and building whatever technology could get us there,’ writes the historian Walter McDougall; ‘the Space Shuttle was a matter of building a technology and going wherever it could take us.’ Armstrong’s small step was the high point of America’s brief love affair with space. At the time, anything seemed possible, and NASA promised that it was. Flying in space, experts predicted, would become as routine as jet travel. In fact, in 1968, PanAm began taking bookings for flights to the moon – the first scheduled for the year 2000. Governor Ronald Reagan reserved a seat. Executives at Hilton Hotels explored the possibility of constructing a lunar resort and the Catholic Church drew up plans for a chapel. Ever the optimist, Paine predicted that ‘by 1984 a round trip, economy-class rocket-plane flight to a comfortably orbiting space station can be brought down to a cost of several thousand dollars’, while a trip to the moon would run in ‘the $10,000 range’. ‘By the time I’m 40,’ the Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley remarked, ‘inter-planetary travel will be common . . . I’m gonna be on Mars.’ He turned forty in 1991.37
The dream died because manned space travel failed to produce a return to justify the massive expense. Unlike the explorers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, astronauts brought back neither gold, nor spices, nor even potatoes. The best they could manage was rocks. The landing itself was enough to justify Apollo 11, but subsequent missions made NASA look like a one-trick pony. Soon after the euphoria of the moon landing dissipated, NASA lost the ability to charm (and fool) the American people. The agency’s capacity to dream up new adventures never waned, but the public’s tolerance for adolescent fantasy had ended.
On a cold morning in early February 1980, Paolo Paoletti left his home in Monza, near Milan, bound for work. As he strode across a courtyard to his car, he noticed four strangers approach, all carrying weapons. He quickly ran back toward his home, but was gunned down on his front step. The killers escaped in a Fiat parked nearby.
Paoletti’s death was tragic but not extraordinary. He was the eighth victim of terrorists in Italy that year. This is not, however, another story about Seventies terrorism, in this case spilling over into a new decade. It is instead a tale of environmental disaster, since Paoletti was killed in revenge for an accident at the ICMESA chemical plant where he worked. In 1976, the plant released a cloud of dioxin-laced gas over the nearby town of Seveso. The terrorists, members of a group called Prima Linea, had executed Paoletti for ‘provoking the dioxin to crush the proletariat’.38
Around lunchtime on 10 July 1976, a reactor at the ICMESA plant in Meda, 20 kilometres north of Milan, overheated, causing a dioxin release. The cloud travelled in a southwesterly direction, contaminating roughly six square kilometres with one of the most toxic chemicals known to man. Dioxin was already notorious as a component of Agent Orange, the herbicide used with devastating effect in Vietnam. Seveso, a town of 17,000 people, received the brunt of the contamination, but nearby Meda, Desio and Cesano Maderno were also affected.
ICMESA was owned by Givaudan, a subsidiary of the Swiss firm Hoffmann-La Roche. Officials at all levels of the company reacted with stony silence, hoping the problem would go away. Residents, however, soon realized something was amiss. ‘I couldn’t breathe,’ Vinicio Lazzaretti recalled. ‘It made my eyes water. The next day all the leaves and plants and flowers were riddled with small holes, as if they had been struck with tiny hailstones.’ A few days later, locals noticed how the ground was littered with dead birds, rats, mice and lizards. Dogs and cats started to bleed from the nose and mouth, then dropped dead. Scare stories circulated on a rising wind of panic. One farmer told how he watched his cat suddenly collapse. When he went to pick the animal up, its tail fell off. He claimed that, when he exhumed the body to show it to investigators, only the skull remained.39
The day after the accident, ICMESA managers admitted that a cloud of herbicide had been released which might cause minor damage to agriculture, but otherwise posed no risk. They advised local residents not to eat vegetables from their gardens. Government officials, inclined to trust ICMESA, relayed that advice the following day, but were otherwise reluctant to probe further. Five days after the release, town administrators declared an area of 12 hectares, containing some 200 people, contaminated, but did not order an evacuation. Lacking guidance from health officials, people stayed put, continuing to drink water from taps and milk from their cows. Some even ate the chickens that had mysteriously died.
After the initial panic, residents seemed determined to downplay the problem. Most had migrated from Sicily, Calabria and the Veneto to take jobs at ICMESA – thus moving from Italy’s poorer regions to one of her wealthiest. Delighting in unaccustomed job security, they bought homes and easily adjusted to a better life. They therefore desperately hoped this problem would dissipate as quickly as the wind that had brought it. Occasional illness from chemical poisoning was fatalistically accepted as the price of a better life.
Ignoring the problem proved difficult, however, when children began exhibiting pustular eruptions, called chloracne, and adults developed liver and kidney ailments. ICMESA, meanwhile, steadfastly refused to acknowledge a problem. On Day 6, officials told the Seveso town council that they were as yet unsure of the nature of the emission, but felt confident that no danger existed. The factory operated virtually as normal, though workers grew restless. Not until 18 July did investigating magistrates rule that Building B, where the accident had occurred, should be sealed. The mayor of Meda promptly extended that order to the entire factory.
Givaudan’s stone wall came tumbling down on the 19th, when officials were forced to admit that dioxin had been found in samples taken from the factory vicinity. A public statement released in Geneva the following day prompted huge headlines in Italian newspapers on the 21st. On that same day, Herwig von Zwehl, the plant’s technical director, and Paoletti, director of production, were arrested. The Milan prefecture decided that a meeting to discuss health issues was necessary, but, rather bizarrely, delayed that meeting until the 24th. By this stage, the number of children suffering from chloracne had approached 200, and over 3,000 animals had died.
Evacuation was finally ordered on the 24th, but was not effected until two days later, when 170 people from Seveso and 55 from Meda were moved from the area deemed heavily contaminated. New laboratory results subsequently predicated enlargement of the danger zone and evacuation of an additional 511 people. A slaughter of animals was also ordered, eventually resulting in 78,000 being culled.
After anguished debate, a decision was made on 2 August to allow ‘therapeutic’ abortions for pregnant women in the first trimester living within the area of maximum contamination. That decision provoked predictable outrage from the Catholic Church. Cardinal Colombo, Archbishop of Milan, urged women considering an abortion to continue their pregnancy, since he was confident that families willing to adopt malformed children could be found. The first three abortions were carried out on 13 August, two by Professor G.B. Candiani of Milan, an outspoken critic of abortion who cooperated only after being told by health officials that there was significant risk to the health of the mother. At the same time, the government advised that women in the area of heaviest contamination should avoid becoming pregnant for at least three months. This provoked another outcry from the church, since strictures prohibiting birth control had to be relaxed.
Finally alerted to the seriousness of the crisis, Italians promptly panicked. Lacking real knowledge about dioxin, they freely indulged in alarmist hearsay. Dioxin took on the character of a modern plague, caused by man’s enslavement to science. Papers carelessly labelled Seveso ‘Italy’s Hiroshima’. The communist newspaper L’Unita consulted a Vietnamese expert on dioxin poisoning, who predicted an epidemic of liver cancer and hepatitis and warned that the poison would be carried through rivers and streams as far as the sea. A retrospective study of the crisis, published in 1978, found that ‘the mass media seemed to suggest that . . . small children burnt by the cloud . . . could be met at every street corner’. It was not just the area that was seen as contaminated, but the people themselves and everything they produced. For months, Italians refused to buy or handle any goods even remotely associated with Seveso.40
The only group managing to remain relatively calm was the people of Seveso, since they could see that effects were localized and that no one, as yet, had died. That said, the papers tried their best to foil their efforts to maintain composure. According to a post-crisis study, ‘Daily assemblies with large audiences at the local level were never able to counteract efficiently the influence of the mass media, where miraculous solutions and reassuring statements alternated with catastrophic perspectives and declarations of impotence.’41
On 11 August, Hoffmann-La Roche took the extraordinary step of admitting blame and promising full compensation. Dr Adolf Jann told a news conference that ‘from the moment the extent of the danger was appreciated, the company’s first priority [has] been to save lives, [and] avoid organic damage to the health of people’. However disingenuous that claim might have been, the company’s decision had the beneficial effect of kickstarting the process of recovery, since a culprit had been identified and compensation promised without a bitter legal battle.42
An investigation nevertheless ensued, with the aim of identifying individuals responsible. It quickly became apparent that Hoffmann-La Roche’s equivocation over the first two weeks of the crisis was not simply a panicked reaction but consistent with a long-term pattern of behaviour. A 1978 study concluded that, ‘The production and diffusion of the toxic cloud . . . was more than an accident. It was the logical, though casual, fallout of a production process where controls and safeguards were practically nonexistent, and which had been modified over the years to maximize output.’ This raised serious questions about possible dioxin release over the three decades prior to the accident. ICMESA had consistently blocked attempts by local authorities to monitor its discharge of effluents. Residents recalled incidents of animals mysteriously dying, for which compensation was quietly paid. The legal investigation eventually led to five ICMESA employees being convicted in 1983 for ‘negligently causing . . . a disaster’. They were given prison sentences ranging from four to five years, but an appeals court reversed their convictions two years later.43
The legal investigation exposed an extraordinary level of contempt shown by Hoffmann La-Roche toward the local community. The firm seemed to think that secrecy and subterfuge were perfectly acceptable, despite the fact that the plant was handling some of the most dangerous chemicals known to man. Local residents, up to and including government officials, were kept entirely in the dark about what was actually made at the plant, rendering the formulation of emergency plans difficult. Investigators also discovered that ‘changes had been made in plant or processes which compromised the safety of the facilities but were not communicated to authorities responsible for public health and safety’.44
Due to the lethality of dioxin, decontamination proved hugely difficult. As early as 16 August, Hoffmann-La Roche urged Italian officials to adopt a ‘scorched earth’ approach, namely dismantling the factory, burning all vegetation and removing up to 30 centimetres of topsoil from the contaminated area. Local officials were, however, understandably reluctant to take such drastic steps. Recovery was therefore slowed by government infighting and interminable debates over appropriate procedure.
Decontamination began in January 1977, with demolition of affected buildings (including the factory) following ten months later. The most seriously contaminated material was sealed in containers and exported to unknown destinations. Hoffmann-La Roche claimed that barrels were sent (appropriately) to Switzerland, but subsequent revelations suggested otherwise.
In 1992, an article in Corriere della Sera revealed that 150 metric tons of heavily contaminated substances, in containers innocuously labelled ‘sodium chloride’, had ended up at a dump in East Germany. Revelations that some of the material might have gone to France led to a bomb attack upon a Hoffmann-La Roche office in Paris. When asked where precisely barrels had been sent, an official at Hoffmann-La Roche pleaded ignorance. ‘That was part of the contract with the disposal firm,’ he explained. ‘They were anxious that no one should know, including ourselves and the Italian authorities. Obviously, they feared that if the location became known there might be difficulties.’45
Two years after the crisis, the most heavily contaminated sector, an area of 90 hectares, continued to stymie clean-up efforts. ‘It may be a wasteland forever – we just don’t know what to do,’ one official complained. Eventually, topsoil to a depth of 40 centimetres was removed. This was placed in huge concrete holding vessels constructed on site, along with other contaminated material. The vessels were then covered with soil brought from outside the region and a large park was built. To locals, that seemed an appropriate memorial. ‘This place was a desert,’ park administrator Antonio Mambriani remarked in 1999. ‘Now, you see it is covered with trees. If anything good came of dioxin, it was probably this park and the green it gave Seveso.’ Thanks to the thoroughness of clean-up efforts, the town now has a lower level of residual dioxin than most of the rest of Italy. Decontamination was not just physical, but also spiritual: the removal of affected buildings and millions of cubic metres of soil allowed the community to feel cleansed, thus aiding recovery.46
Seveso, it seems, was a disaster without devastation. The only clearly identifiable fatality was Paoletti who, most Italians felt, got what he deserved. As for the rest of the community, life returned to normal, or, in many cases, better than normal, much more quickly than most people expected. Evacuees first began returning in October 1977. Those whose homes had to be demolished were given new houses of equal or greater value. Former factory workers were all found new jobs. Children affected by chloracne got free holidays and other compensation.
Public health was carefully monitored, to the point where Seveso became the most systematically studied case of dioxin contamination in history. The health effects have not lived up to the biblical plague so often predicted. Anecdotal evidence pointed to an unusual incidence of some cancers and other ailments, but statistics proved inconclusive despite the determination of investigators to uncover every stone. Nor were an unusual number of malformed babies born. The only identifiable medical effect over the short term was a skewed gender ratio among infants born in the area during the first seven years after the accident. Baby girls outnumbered boys by forty-six to twenty-eight, a disproportion consistent with dioxin.
The most important consequence of Seveso, it seems, was not illness, but resolve, represented most profoundly by the European Community’s Seveso Directive. The EC, slowly inching toward regulation of dangerous industries due to accidents at Flixborough in the UK in 1974, Beek in the Netherlands in 1975 and Manfredonia in Italy in 1976, acted with atypical urgency after Seveso. A strict system of regulation and monitoring was instituted, but the most impressive aspect of the directive was the way it addressed the contempt shown by Hoffmann-La Roche toward the local population. The EC established a ‘need to know’ principle, which stipulated that local residents and industrial workers must be informed about the hazards of an industry. While this falls short of the ‘right to know’ principle common in the United States, in the sense that ‘experts’ determine ‘need’, it was a massive step forward.
Therein lies the paradox of Seveso. Instead of hundreds of malformed children and horrible deaths, we have what appears to be a safer world resulting from a disaster that did not happen. Instead of despair, Seveso symbolizes recovery. This image is, however, dangerous as it encourages a false sense of security about the ability of modern industrial societies to act in their own best interest. In the early 1990s, for instance, Seveso was used by officials in Arkansas not as an example of the risks of dioxin poisoning, but of the safety of production processes. Critics of a proposed toxic waste incinerator were bombarded with evidence from Seveso (of which there is so much) supposedly demonstrating that risks would be minimal. The evidence that Seveso seems to present, namely that low level dioxin contamination is not dangerous, has encouraged a complacency toward the chemical, thus impeding efforts to find a safer alternative. By the same token, the remarkable recovery of Seveso has been used as justification for limited liability on the part of polluters, thus affecting assessments of damage and levels of compensation.
Regulations like those enshrined in the Seveso Directive reinforce the belief that all will be well. Ironically, however, it was the absence of regulations that facilitated Seveso’s miraculous recovery. The process of healing was quickened because the most heavily contaminated materials were packed up and exported to destinations unknown, just the sort of clandestine operation which new regulations render impossible. Further, it is well to bear in mind that Seveso’s recovery was aided profoundly by the fact that there was never any doubt about culpability, which meant that a bruising legal fight was avoided. Recompense was offered with unusual speed. Had Hoffmann-La Roche been able to argue that it had complied with safety regulations, the firm would have been less likely to cooperate in the process of recovery. Regulations do not just protect the public, they also protect industrial firms from those seeking recompense.
Seveso’s legacy is therefore difficult to assess. Over the years, it has evolved into an example of how modern industrial societies cope with and adjust to ecological threats. It has reinforced confidence that tree-hugging doom merchants can be ignored – that ecological crises are never as bad as predicted. Yet that is whistling in the dark. Seveso is a typical Seventies ecological disaster. The plethora of such disasters, including, perhaps most notoriously, that of Love Canal in Niagara Falls, New York, has encouraged the belief that environmental safety declined during the decade, when in fact the opposite is true. These disasters are notorious precisely because awareness of environmental issues rose significantly during the decade, as did the public’s assertion of its right to a cleaner environment. ‘Twenty years ago we just accepted our lot,’ an ordinary Welsh housewife who led a protest against a polluting factory confessed in 1972. ‘We wouldn’t have thought about protesting, but things have changed and we won’t stand for it any longer.’ The decade was one of enormous environmental progress, symbolized most profoundly by the first Earth Day on 22 April 1970. But awareness did not necessarily lead to good practice. Seveso illustrates the prevalent ‘What can we get away with?’ attitude that typifies the approach to environmental questions. There has been a tendency to address the effects of high-growth, high-consumption habits without questioning the assumed right to live that way. This has meant piling up problems for the future, but also, in many cases, exporting unpleasant production processes (or effluents) to countries too poor to enjoy the luxury of high environmental standards. As Gladwyn Hill wrote in the New York Times, on the occasion of the first Earth Day, what was needed was ‘a sudden, remarkable, spontaneous rebellion not of one group against another so much as of everybody against the physical conditions to which two centuries of promiscuous “progress” have brought us’.47
Seveso also illustrates precisely how dangerous the short-term mentality typical of so much environmental concern can be. The community seems to have recovered miraculously and the ill-effects have supposedly been minor. Recent studies, however, suggest something different. On 1 August 2008, researchers at the University of Milan revealed that a study of 1,772 women who lived in the contaminated zone were six times more likely than a similar control group to give birth to babies with altered thyroid function, a condition which can lead to reduced growth and retarded intellectual development. ‘Our findings’, the study concluded, ‘indicate that maternal exposure to persistent environmental contaminants such as [dioxin] produces effects on neonatal thyroid function that may occur far apart in time from the initial exposure.’ In other words, the most profound effect of Seveso might be felt by a generation born twenty or thirty years after the disaster. And what about the children of those children, as yet unborn? Perhaps the wisest comment on Seveso was uttered two years after the accident by Ugo Basilico, a local builder who, along with his wife, decided not to have a second child. ‘Even the professors don’t know,’ he remarked. ‘They forecast. They warn. They show concern. But they don’t know.’48
On 16 March 1979, The China Syndrome premiered in the United States. In the film, a reporter, played by Jane Fonda, asks a nuclear power expert what the consequence of a meltdown at a nuclear plant might be. He replies that it would ‘render an area the size of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable’. Twelve days later, life imitated art. A meltdown occurred at Three Mile Island – in Pennsylvania.49
In the years after Hiroshima, America fell in love with the atom. Physicists boasted that electricity would become so cheap to produce that there would be no point in metering it – it could be given away. Experts, convinced of their own invincibility, condescendingly dismissed fears about safety. The attractiveness of nuclear power increased after the Arab oil boycott, the mighty atom providing the perfect response to OPEC’s stranglehold. Nuclear generation also seemed clean, an important point at a time of growing eco-awareness.
Basking in public goodwill, utility companies laid down plans for scores of nuclear plants. ‘We had no control over the number,’ Harold Denton, chief of reactor operations at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, admits. The rate of approval led critics to conclude that the NRC had abandoned regulation in favour of the rubber stamp. That unease was shared by insiders. Peter Bradford, an NRC Commissioner, saw quite a few colleagues leave in the mid-1970s over concerns that safety was being neglected. The official position seemed to be ‘that everything was safe enough already’. As a result, ‘anyone who wanted to raise a new concern, anyone who was sceptical that a particular plant should be licensed, had an immensely heavy burden . . . Because nothing, nothing serious had happened yet.’ An inquiry after the accident would severely criticize the NRC for being ‘an agency hypnotized by equipment’.50
The nuclear plant at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania was located on a sandbar on the Susquehanna River, just 10 miles from Harris-burg, the state capitol. Reactor No. 2 had gone into operation on the very last day of 1978, so that its owners, Metropolitan Edison, could benefit from tax credits totalling $40 million. That decision to go live was probably hasty. During the period between 28 March 1978, when the chain reaction started, and the commencement of power generation on 31 December – a total of 274 days – malfunctions forced shutdowns on 195 days. The shutdowns were caused by problems similar to those which eventually led to the worst nuclear accident in American history.
The first hint of a crisis came at 04.00 on 28 March 1979. Two bursts of a klaxon tore through the control room after the main feedwater pumps mysteriously stopped. As per the established protocol, both the turbine and the reactor automatically shut down. This, however, led to a build-up of pressure in the containment vessel, which triggered an automatic valve to open. Once the pressure was released, the valve should have closed. Unbeknownst to the operators, it failed to do so. Cooling water drained from the system, causing the nuclear core to overheat. In an instant, a minor problem became a major calamity.
In the control room, a technician witnessed ‘Bells . . . ringing, lights . . . flashing, and everybody . . . grabbing and scratching.’ Up to this point, every action had been programmed, automatic responses to clear signals. Suddenly, however, human beings, with fickle judgement, intervened. Lacking a reliable indicator of the coolant level, technicians surmised that the containment vessel must be flooding, when it fact it was draining. They therefore reacted precisely in the opposite way to what was demanded – they shut off the emergency water system. Left alone, it would have cooled the dangerously overheating core. Fuel rods were consequently exposed and meltdown began.51
Inside the control room, the cacophony of lights, klaxons and sirens increased. ‘The place was swarming with white hats,’ an operator recalled. Despite the hullabaloo, engineers remained convinced that meltdown was impossible. ‘Most of us who had spent our lives in this business didn’t believe that could happen,’ Bob Long recalled. ‘We had a mindset that . . . we had these marvellous safety systems which had back-ups of back-ups . . . That . . . made it hard for people to really come to grips with the reality that severe damage had occurred.’ In fact, by dawn the core had reached 4,300 degrees – true meltdown would occur at 5,200 degrees. That could, in turn, lead to ‘China syndrome’, when the core burns its way through the concrete base of the plant, superheating the groundwater underneath and causing fissures to spider in all directions. Highly radioactive geysers of steam would then erupt, causing a deadly radiation shower.52
At 06.15, a new alarm sounded, this time indicating radiation in the control room. Technicians had suddenly to accept that foolproof safety systems were not coping. Supervisor Gary Miller immediately issued a general emergency declaration, a situation unprecedented in the American nuclear industry. Emergency services were consequently mobilized, a development inevitably noticed by journalists. Mike Pintek, a local reporter, phoned the plant, somehow got through to the control room and, to his immense surprise, was told of the crisis. Pintek then relayed this information to his radio listeners, triggering panic. By 09.06 the Associated Press was reporting the accident nationwide. Reporters flocked to the plant.
‘I knew we were in another dimension,’ Governor Dick Thorn-burgh felt when alerted to the situation. ‘My first thought was that . . . no accident at a nuclear plant could be anything but serious.’ He immediately mobilized the state’s emergency council, chaired by William Scranton, the lieutenant governor. Scranton contacted MetEd, who insisted there was no cause for alarm. ‘We are not in a China Syndrome situation,’ David Klucsick, a company spokesman insisted. That confidence was quickly relayed to journalists at an impromptu press conference. ‘Everything is under control,’ Scranton announced. ‘There is and was no danger to public health and safety.’ Before long, Scranton discovered that he had inadvertently colluded in subterfuge. ‘The indignation that welled up within me was memorable. I still haven’t gotten over that.’53
That afternoon, MetEd held its own press conference. The company chose as their official spokesman Jack Herbein, a boorish nuclear engineer with no public relations experience. His first mistake was to refer to the morning’s events as an ‘accident’, a word he attempted to swallow between the ‘d’ and the ‘e’. The word he preferred – ‘incident’ – then shot from his mouth like a watermelon seed. That shaky start permanently destroyed his credibility; his dishonesty was as obvious as a long wooden nose. Herbein’s credibility suffered further when he came up with the quintessential engineer’s euphemism, calling the problem ‘a normal aberration’. Reporters, feeding on the carrion of catastrophe, refused to swallow Herbein’s cosy fibs. ‘I didn’t buy it and there were quite a few other people that didn’t buy it,’ Robert Reid, mayor of nearby Middletown recalled. He was especially annoyed by Herbein’s condescending replies, as if he, the expert, should not have to answer ignorant questions. Interviewed later in the day, Scranton was unable to disguise his distrust of MetEd. The situation, he admitted, was ‘more complex than the company first led us to believe’.54
A new player now entered the fray, in the form of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Bethesda, Maryland. A crisis team was mobilized, and experts sent to Three Mile Island. Initially at least, the NRC shared MetEd’s confidence. ‘I thought it had been a small loss-of-coolant accident,’ Denton recalled. His natural instinct was to assume that the problem would quickly be solved by the plant’s built-in safety measures. ‘It was . . . the Titanic sort of mentality that this plant was so well designed that . . . you couldn’t possibly have a serious core damage.’ Experts, however, soon received a crash course in fallibility. ‘The collective feelings’, an engineer related, ‘went from: a. bravado and disbelief; to b. caution in jumping to conclusions; to c. grudging admission that maybe something was wrong; to d. realization that it was, indeed, a real accident; to e. apprehension that the reactor really might melt; and, finally, to a feeling of awe and humility that the technology that we had thought was foolproof wasn’t.’55
Jim Higgins, among the first NRC experts to arrive at Three Mile Island, encountered a scene from the Twilight Zone – the plant was virtually deserted but for some personnel in full radiation suits and respirator masks. ‘It gave the impression like, there is something very wrong here.’ Respirators made communication hugely difficult, a problem compounded by the fact that there were only two telephone lines into the plant, and they were quickly overloaded. ‘There was just a terrible communications problem,’ Denton confessed. ‘You got only bits and pieces.’ Information was instead passed by a system of runners using walkie-talkies, with the inevitable result that vital statistics were garbled on the bush telegraph. Not until the evening was Babcock & Wilcox, the designers of the plant, able to communicate the vital instruction to pump water into the containment vessel. That seemed to stabilize the situation. The core temperature began to drop, and the crisis seemed to pass.56
That was the message Walter Cronkite conveyed on the CBS Evening News when he described the crisis as just ‘the first step in a nuclear nightmare . . . no worse than that’. That impression was confirmed when Scranton visited the next day. Though unnerved by having to don heavy protective gear, and by encountering contaminated water, he went away feeling calm. MetEd officials had, meanwhile, begun an aggressive public relations campaign. Appearing on ABC’s Good Morning America, president Walter Creitz assured viewers that the problem had been brought under control without injury to anyone.57
The NRC did not share Creitz’s confidence and was, in fact, growing increasingly annoyed by MetEd complacency. From the beginning, NRC staff had advocated limited evacuation, an option Thornburgh resisted. ‘No matter how well planned,’ he later explained, ‘evacuations had the potential to kill or injure people.’ On the 30th, however, a new revelation seemed to justify NRC pessimism. In the early morning, technicians reported that a large cloud of radioactive gas had escaped. When pressed for hard figures on the size of the release, Creitz replied: ‘I’ll be honest . . . I don’t know.’ Nor could he promise that the problem would not recur. Under renewed pressure, Thorn-burgh stubbornly resisted evacuation. An exasperated Joseph Hendrie, the NRC commissioner, vented his frustration to his staff: ‘We are operating almost totally in the blind, [Thornburgh’s] information is ambiguous, mine is non-existent . . . it’s like a couple of blind men staggering around making decisions.’ Denton, agreeing with Hendrie, argued that ‘the important thing . . . is to get a start rather than sitting here waiting to die. Even if we can’t minimize the individual dose, there might still be a chance to limit the population dose.’58
An evacuation of everyone in a 5-mile radius of the plant would have involved 24,522 people. Double the radius and the number increased six-fold. Double it again and over 635,000 people would require moving. Evacuation plans were sketchy, having been devolved to the various counties and towns. A local authority lawyer, who was tasked with improvizing plans after the accident had already occurred, confessed that he felt let down by the failure of state and federal authorities to provide guidance. ‘I don’t know what they assumed, but if they assumed the counties knew [what to do] then they shouldn’t have done that. They shouldn’t have assumed anything. Because counties didn’t plan for nuclear accidents. Nobody planned for nuclear accidents.’ Oren Henderson, head of the Pennsylvania civil defence authority, later admitted feeling completely overwhelmed. ‘We lacked so much knowledge about what was going on.’ To his horror, Thornburgh discovered that plans called for Dauphin County, on one side of the river, and Cumberland County, on the other, to evacuate in convergent directions. In other words, two crowds would collide on a bridge over the Susquehanna.59
Thornburgh compromised by urging everyone within a 10-mile radius to stay indoors until further notice. One resident recalled how the sense of crisis descended at his elementary school:
We came back inside from a recess and the teachers seemed very nervous and kept us in our rooms. Periodically the teacher would come in to the room and say, ‘Johnny, your mother is here’ and the child would leave. At first we didn’t know what was going on and the departures only made those of us remaining even more scared. At some point, the teachers told us about the accident and the possibility that the area would be too dangerous to live in for 40 years if the worst happened. The world seemed a very chaotic, scary thing . . . that day.
An enterprising Harrisburg official came up with the bright idea of using air raid sirens to drive home Thornburgh’s message. A fullblown panic inevitably resulted. ‘People in Harrisburg are running around like crazy,’ a news cameraman noted.60
Lacking firm guidance from government, residents took matters into their own hands. ‘You hear one thing from the utility,’ Suzanne Machita complained in the midst of packing her car. ‘Then one thing from the Government, another thing from Harrisburg and something else from civil defense. I don’t know what to believe, what to do, so I guess the best thing is to go. It’s better than doing nothing.’ Robin Stuart received a panicked phone call from her sister in California. ‘Get out!’ she cried. ‘Get out. Hurry up and get out.’ Before long, the phone started ringing non-stop with friends around the country shouting the same message. Marsha McHenry found her neighbours in a determined mood. ‘[They said] that I was to come down to their house, they had guns and they had a chainsaw and a big truck and they would get up on the highway, cut down any barriers that were there and fight their way through.’ Reid watched in horror as the roads out of Middletown became hopelessly clogged with overloaded cars.61
At a press conference on Friday, Herbein openly questioned the advice to stay indoors: ‘It’s certainly the civil defense’s prerogative to take those steps, but we don’t think it . . . necessary. If the civil defense chooses to tell inhabitants of Middletown to keep their windows and doors shut, that’s their prerogative. We have our windows and doors open.’ He added, for good measure, that consumers would have to absorb the multimillion dollar cost of decontamination. Journalists revolted. ‘Mr. Herbein,’ someone interjected, ‘is your plant a lemon?’ Frustration led to journalistic meltdown. ‘I live a mile from the plant,’ one reporter shouted. ‘What are you going to be doing to protect my family?’ Another calmly asked: ‘Mr. Herbein, don’t you feel a responsibility to a million people living around the plant to keep them informed?’ Wounded by having his authority questioned, Herbein stuttered: ‘I don’t know why, I don’t know why we need to, we need to tell you each and every thing that we do.’ Pintek shot back: ‘Well, why not, Jack? You know, we only live here, and you may kill us here before you’re all finished.’ Pintek later reflected: ‘I was angry . . . in fact, I’m still angry. I was just upset with the way things were being handled and the way we were lied to.’ Finally, with television cameras capturing the moment, a clearly rattled Herbein shouted: ‘We didn’t injure anybody. We didn’t overexpose anybody. We didn’t kill a single soul. The release of radioactivity off-site was minimal.’62
Pintek found that his job had suddenly become personal. A group of professional journalists had morphed into a mob frightened for their lives. ‘I shouted a question to Jack Herbein . . . along the lines of, “You started to melt that thing down, didn’t you, didn’t you?” . . . at that moment I was not a journalist any more, . . . I lived here and I was mad. I was angry.’ Amidst the tumult, few grasped the import of Herbein’s rather nonchalant announcement that a bubble of hydrogen gas was building up in the reactor core. ‘It’s serious,’ he remarked, ‘but not to the extent that we have to evacuate the citizenry.’ After all, what could be more harmless than a bubble?63
Thornburgh, reassured by MetEd confidence, remained convinced that he could get away with limited evacuation. He asked Hendrie for advice, and the reply seemed to contradict that confidence. ‘If my wife were pregnant and we had small children in the area,’ Hendrie replied, ‘I would get them out, because we don’t know what’s going to happen.’ Pregnant women and pre-school age children living within a 5-mile radius were therefore urged to leave. Since the governor had essentially admitted that there was a health risk, the exodus quickened, with some 140,000 people eventually leaving. ‘The moment that’s so crystal clear in my mind is driving on the highway and trying to imagine what would happen to this area,’ McHenry recalled. ‘All of this beautiful countryside would be destroyed. It would be so contaminated that nobody could be there for hundreds of years. I looked as hard as I could at everything, and tried to burn it into my mind, what everything looked like, because I wasn’t going to see it again.’64
Thornburgh was buffeted between MetEd’s equivocation and journalists’ trepidation. ‘We worked hard to preserve our credibility by releasing only such information as we were confident in and by correcting any misleading information,’ he reflected. ‘This effort was frustrating in the extreme due to the wide variety of sources, many of which were ill-informed or uninformed.’ In desperation, he asked President Carter to send an overseer he could trust. Carter immediately dispatched Denton. ‘[That] proved to be a turning point,’ Thornburgh concluded. ‘[Denton] was able to translate nuclear jargon into plain English and earned the confidence of me and my staff, the news media, and the general public.’ Pintek echoed that appraisal: ‘He’s kind of this slow talking . . . southern-sounding kind of guy who automatically puts you at ease . . . That’s kind of how it felt: Finally someone is here that we can trust.’65
Denton issued an immediate statement: ‘We’ve assured ourselves that there is no imminent danger to the public as a result of the way the core is being cooled.’ Beneath that calm, anxieties lurked. ‘I was dealing with absolute chaos,’ he recalled. ‘They (MetEd) were fighting fires. They were trying to cope with all the demands being placed on them and they didn’t have enough staff.’ He decided to take matters out of the hands of MetEd and to make all crucial decisions himself. His immediate concern was the hydrogen bubble. Estimates put it at 1,000 cubic feet. Two possibilities existed, both catastrophic. The worst was that the bubble would continue to grow and force coolant out of the reactor, causing the core to speed back towards meltdown. Slightly less serious was the possibility that a spark would cause the bubble to explode, blowing the top off the containment vessel. A Princeton scientist calculated that the bubble contained energy equivalent to three tons of TNT. After that revelation, panic quickly descended. ‘How the hell do we get the bubble out of there?’ Denton’s assistant Roger Mattson shouted. He sensed a race with death which made Thornburgh’s reluctance to evacuate seem stupid. ‘Got to say it . . . I don’t know what we are protecting at this point. I think we ought to be moving people.’66
News broadcasts freely used the word ‘meltdown’, thus fuelling panic. ‘The world has never known a day quite like today,’ Cronkite remarked that Friday. ‘It faced the considerable uncertainties and dangers of the worst nuclear power plant accident of the atomic age. And the horror tonight is that it could get much worse. The potential is there for the ultimate risk of a meltdown.’ Thornburgh was outraged by the reckless irresponsibility of that statement. ‘One could almost feel the collective shudder going through central Pennsylvania.’ Reporting on something they did not remotely understand, journalists were forced to trust ‘experts’, who were themselves flummoxed. Journalists feasted on predictions of doom. Jim Hill, a local reporter, later remarked: ‘After three days feeding on the carcass of Three Mile Island, I was beginning to feel as ugly as what I ate. There was nothing delicious about this story.’67
Overfed on rumour, residents feared the worst. ‘I had an image of the whole valley being completely devastated and people just falling over,’ one housewife later told an interviewer. ‘There would be no place to go to escape it . . . The whole thing seemed so futile to me that I just couldn’t think about it. You couldn’t eat, you couldn’t drink . . . There was just nothing you could do.’ The helplessness felt by ordinary people was exacerbated by conflicting signals from those in authority. Reports from the NRC seemed grave, while those from MetEd remained upbeat. Herbein told reporters on Friday night that the bubble had shrunk from 1,000 to 800 cubic feet, adding that ‘I personally think the crisis is over’. Around the same time, Mattson was approaching panic. He had been thinking of a crisis coming within days, but suddenly decided that an explosion could occur at any moment. In contrast, another NRC engineer, Victor Stello, argued that there was little danger of explosion – the problem would correct itself. In other words, the situation was either catastrophic or harmless, with nothing in between.68
At 21.00 on Saturday, the Associated Press reported that the bubble was ‘showing signs of becoming potentially explosive, complicating decisions on whether to mount a risky operation to remove the gas’. Officials surmised that ‘tens of thousands of people might have to be evacuated if engineers decided to try to remove the bubble, operations that could risk a meltdown’. After that announcement, Paul Critchlow, the governor’s press secretary, faced a near riot. ‘About 20 or 30 reporters burst through the door of this office. They said: “We want to know if our lives are in danger. What the hell’s going on here? We want to know if we have to get out.” . . . They were pale. They were frightened. At that point, they had lost interest in the story they were supposed to be covering.’ ‘It’s Saturday night,’ Pintek recalls thinking. ‘I’m saying to myself, my life, at about 27 years old, is going to be over, because these – these arrogant utility operators have allowed this thing to run out of control and they’re going to kill us.’ At 23.00, Denton tried to calm nerves. ‘We see no possibility of hydrogen explosions in either the containment or the reactor vessel in the near term,’ he told reporters. That, however, did not rule out an explosion in the long term. Journalists uneasily speculated on Denton’s definitions of ‘near’ and ‘long’.69
President Carter was fuming, annoyed not just by the crisis, but by how poorly the news had been handled. ‘There are too many people talking,’ he complained to his press secretary Jody Powell. ‘And my impression is that half of them don’t know what they are talking about . . . Get those people to speak with one voice.’ That, however, was impossible. ‘That AP piece was the crowning blow,’ a White House aide later remarked. ‘The president felt that the information . . . was frightening a lot of people. He wanted to show the public that it was not dangerous.’ An aide suggested that Carter should go to Three Mile Island. When Powell raised this possibility with Denton, the latter was enthusiastic. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘I think it would be a great help.’70
On Sunday morning, Stello went to mass. To his astonishment, the priest offered the congregation general absolution, the sacrament given when death is imminent. Only then did it dawn on Stello how the crisis was affecting ordinary people, who had no knowledge of nuclear power and no standard by which to judge massively conflicting reports. ‘What we had done to these people [was] just outrageous,’ he reflected. ‘We had frightened them so bad . . . they thought they were gonna die.’71
Carter’s visit was taking place at the same time as Hendrie’s announcement that residents within a radius of 20 miles should prepare to evacuate. Since that was the largest evacuation yet suggested, it implied a crisis spiralling beyond control. As Carter flew into the complex, he contemplated the possibility that the reactor might explode at any moment. On the ground, the two principal protagonists in the bubble scare, Stello and Mattson, were at each other’s throats. Stello berated Mattson for spreading unwarranted fear, while Mattson criticized Stello for complacency. Meanwhile, Denton briefed Carter, without being fully certain which of his two deputies was right. Carter realized that he had no choice but to follow through with the visit; since his only purpose was to calm fears, he would cause a stampede if he shied away. The moment demanded that he act presidential.
Stello worked frantically to turn conjecture into fact. He sensed there was something wrong with Mattson’s calculations, but couldn’t quite put his finger on it. When realization dawned, it proved embarrassingly simple: hydrogen needs oxygen to explode, and there was not enough oxygen in the containment vessel. The bubble had probably never been a threat.
Carter’s visit calmed nerves. Fred Lynch, who helped direct traffic for the visit, remarked: ‘The president of the United States doesn’t just walk into a danger area. It kind of makes you feel comfortable.’ The crisis was not yet over, but panic cooled at the same rate as the core. In the end, the danger to the general public had been tiny, or so it seems. Because vent monitors malfunctioned, there is no reliable documentation of the actual radiation released. Those in the area who subsequently lost loved ones to cancer believe the plant was to blame. Most epidemiologists are equally certain that it was not. In 1996, a federal judge dismissed damage claims by more than 2,000 residents, citing a ‘paucity of proof’.72
Residents could not, however, easily forget their terror. One Harris-burg housewife compared the situation to when Hurricane Agnes hit central Pennsylvania in 1972. ‘There was fear then, but nothing like in 1979. We could see the floodwaters, but we knew that in a few days or weeks, we could start rebuilding our lives. With Three Mile Island, we couldn’t see the danger, but we knew that if this “flood” hit, we could never come back. Many people I know still have not forgiven MetEd, and never will, for what they did to us.’ Thornburgh agreed that the disaster was made much worse by the ham-fisted public relations of MetEd. ‘It first seemed to speak with many voices, and then with none at all.’73
Three years would pass before engineers could discern precisely how serious the crisis had been. As it turned out, journalists were perfectly entitled to use the term ‘meltdown’ since that is precisely what had occurred. A camera lowered into the core revealed that 50 per cent had melted down, or 20 tons of uranium had been turned into a molten mass. ‘It was not the China Syndrome,’ Mattson remarked, ‘but we melted the core down . . . No question about it.’74
At the Middletown Elks Club, the cheeseburger was renamed ‘The Meltdown’ and a bowl of beans became the ‘bubble buster’. A local radio station offered a mock weather forecast: ‘Partly cloudy tomorrow with a 40 percent chance of survival.’ ‘What’s the five-day forecast for Harrisburg?’ a DJ asked. ‘Two days.’ Jack Baker, who ran a shop in Middletown, made a killing on T-shirts that read ‘Happiness is a cool reactor’ and ‘Hell no, we won’t glow’. Humour, however, was a thin veneer applied over a dense core of anguish. For a few days, panic had been entirely warranted. The crisis had been compounded by the abject failure of the authorities to cope. ‘I don’t see how you could ever erase the memories of frustration, of uncertainty . . . punctuated by moments of stark terror that attach to an incident like Three Mile Island,’ Thornburgh reflected. America’s love affair with the atom subsequently went into meltdown. ‘If our faith in MetEd is shaken’, wrote the Middletown Press and Journal in a front-page editorial, ‘our belief in the entire nuclear power industry also rides on thin ice.’ After Three Mile Island, no new plants were ordered in the United States. ‘This is the end of nuclear power,’ one expert predicted. ‘From now on in, it’s going to be coal city.’75