Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (13 page)

As usual, the Argentinian, along with his wife Rita and his colleagues, celebrated this latest success in the bar of the Hotel
Grand in Calcutta. But as he raised his champagne glass to the success of the future Indian factory, he felt a nagging doubt.
“Five thousand tons, five thousand tons!” he repeated, shaking his head. “I’m afraid our Indian friends may have been thinking
a bit too big! A factory with the capacity for two thousand tons would be quite large enough for us to supply the whole of
India with Sevin.”

The first sales figures for the Sevin formulated in the small unit on the Kali Grounds were not very encouraging. This was
the reason for Eduardo Muñoz’s reluctance. Despite an extensive information and advertising campaign, the Indian farmers were
not readily giving up familiar products like HCH and DDT. The climatic variations of so immense a country with its late or
inadequate monsoons and its frequent droughts that could suddenly reduce demand, meant that regular sales of the product could
not be guaranteed. A salesman above all else, Muñoz had run his numbers over and over again. His most optimistic predictions
did not exceed annual sales of two thousand tons. Wisdom ordained that Carbide should limit its ambitions. Certain that he
would be able to convince his superiors, he flew to New York. In his briefcase, meticulously sorted by province, groups of
villages and sometimes even by individual village, were the results of his first sales effort. He hoped they would be enough
to persuade his employers that they should modify their investment in India, even if it meant leaving room for eventual competitors.
He was wrong. That journey to New York was to set the seal on the first act in a catastrophe.

The Argentinian could never have imagined that his greatest adversary would be a man who had been dead for twenty-one years.
The whole of American industry continued to revere as a prophet the man who, shortly after the second world war, had revolutionized
relations between management and work-force. As an obscure employee in a Philadelphia bank, Edward N. Hay, who sported a short
Charlie Chaplin–style mustache and oversleeves to protect his starched shirts, had seemed unlikely to leave behind much of
a legacy. The obsessive ideas of this nondescript clerk, however, would make him as famous a figure in the industrial world
as Frederick Taylor, the man who developed the theory of scientific management of factory work. Edward N. Hay was convinced
that the members of the industrial workforce did not receive the attention they warranted. Starting from this premise, he
had devised a point system to evaluate every job done in a company. The idea was immediately adopted by a number of branches
of American industry. By the end of the 1960s Union Carbide was one of the most enthusiastic users of his methods. All of
its industrial projects were automatically assigned a point value, according to a system that determined the importance, size
and sophistication of any installations to be constructed. The more numerous and complex the project, the higher the number
of points. Because each point corresponded to a salary advantage, it was in the interests of the engineers assigned to planning
and implementing any industrial project to see that, right from the outset, it was given the maximum number of points possible.

“I realized at once, I didn’t stand a chance,” Eduardo Muñoz would recount. “Even before they heard what I had to say, the
management committee, made up of all the division heads and key members of the board of directors, had rallied enthusiastically
in support of the Indian proposal.”

“India has a market of three hundred million peasants,” immediately declared one of Carbide’s executives.

“Five hundred million soon,” added one of his colleagues.

“Don’t you worry, Eduardo, we’ll sell our five thousand tons, and more!” was the message unanimously delivered. “Moreover,”
announced Carbide’s CEO, “to show you just how much faith we have in this project, we’re allocating it a budget of twenty
million dollars.”

“An extravagant sum that Mr. Hay’s point system was going to spread in a manner advantageous to everyone,” Muñoz would reckon
after meeting the South Charleston engineers in charge of laying the plans for the factory. These men were high-level chemists
and mechanics, respected leaders in the field of manufacturing processes, in charge of reputable projects; in short they were
the elite of the workforce at Union Carbide’s technical research center in South Charleston. “But they were all little dictators,”
Muñoz would say. “They were obsessed with just one idea, that of using their twenty-million-dollar bounty to create the most
beautiful pesticide plant India would ever know.”

Showing them his documents, the Argentinian tried desperately to explain to his partners the distinctive characteristics of
the Indian market. His line of reasoning left them cold.

“The Indian government’s license is for an annual production of five thousand tons of pesticide. So we have a duty to build
a plant to produce five thousand tons,” Muñoz recalled the project’s chief engineer interjecting in a cutting voice.

“Clearly my commercial arguments were of no concern to those young dogs,” Muñoz would remember. “They weren’t bound by any
obligation to make a profit. They were simply itching to plant their flares, reactors and miles of piping in the Indian countryside.”

In the face of such obstinacy, the Argentinian sought a compromise.

“Wouldn’t it be possible to proceed in stages?” he suggested. “That is to say, to start by building a two thousand ton unit,
which could then be enlarged if the market proved favorable?”

“My question brought sarcasm from the audience,” recalled Muñoz.

“My dear Eduardo,” the project chief went on, “you must appreciate that engineering work for this type of factory requires
that we establish the size of production envisaged from the outset. The reactors, tanks and controlling mechanisms of a plant
that manufactures two thousand tons of Sevin are not of the same caliber as those of a factory two and a half times larger.
Once a production target has been set, it can’t be changed.”

“I take your point,” Muñoz conceded, trying to be tactful. “Especially as I imagine it’s possible to slow down production
in a factory that is larger than necessary to adapt production to demand?”

“That’s exactly right,” the project chief agreed, pleased to see the discussion ending with consensus.

Alas, this consensus was only an illusion.

The Argentinian still had plenty of issues to take up with the men from South Charleston. The most important one had to do
with the actual conception of the Indian factory. The Institute factory near South Charleston, which had been designed to
produce thirty thousand tons of Sevin a year and which was to serve more or less as a model, functioned around the clock.
In order to maintain this continuity, considerable quantities of MIC, methyl isocyanate, had to be manufactured and stored.
At the South Charleston plant, three tanks made out of high resistance steel and fitted with a complex refrigeration system
stored up to a hundred and twenty tons of MIC.

To Muñoz’s way of thinking, stocking such a quantity of this highly dangerous product might be justifiable for a factory like
the one at the Institute, which ran twenty-four hours a day, but not in a much more modest plant where production was carried
out as the need arose. For his own peace of mind the Argentinian went to Bayer in Germany and to the French Littorale factory
near Béziers. Both companies handled MIC.

“All the experts I met went through the roof when I told them our engineers intended to store twenty-two to twenty-six thousand
gallons of MIC in the tanks at the prospective Bhopal plant,” Muñoz would recount. “One German told me, ‘We only produce our
methyl icocyanate as needed. We’d never risk keeping a single liter for more than ten minutes.’ Another added, ‘Your engineers
are out of their minds. They’re putting an atomic bomb in the middle of your factory that could explode at any time.’ As for
the Béziers engineers, the French government had quite simply forbidden them to stock MIC in anything but the small number
of twenty-gallon drums that they imported directly from the United States as required.”

Shaken by the unanimity of opinion, the Argentinian returned to South Charleston to try and convince Carbide that it should
modify its plans for the future Bhopal plant. Rather than store tens of thousands of gallons of potentially fatal materials,
Muñoz suggested producing MIC in batches, on an as-needed basis, a system similar to the one used at Béziers. This system
eliminated the need to keep large quantities of dangerous substances on site.

“I quickly realized that my proposal ran counter to American industrial culture,” Muñoz would recall. “In the United States,
they love to produce around the clock, in large quantities. They’re besotted with enormous pipes running into giant tanks.
That’s how the whole of the oil industry and many others work.”

Nevertheless, the South Charleston team wanted to allay the visitor’s fears.

“The numerous safety systems with which this type of plant is equipped enable us to control any of the MIC’s potentially dangerous
reactions,” the project leader assured him. “You have absolutely no need to worry. Your Bhopal plant will be as inoffensive
as a chocolate factory.”

Other problems awaited the Argentinian on his return to India. His next priority was to find a site for the prospective factory.
His superiors in New York and South Charleston had agreed upon the choice of Bhopal, which was already home to the Sevin formulation
unit. But the new site would have to be completely different in size. The plant would be a hydra-headed monster. There would
be the unit producing alpha naphthol, one for carbon oxide, one for phosgene and one for methyl isocyanate. Alongside these
installations with their control rooms, works and hangars, the plant would also have a collection of administrative buildings,
a canteen, an infirmary, a decontamination center and a fire station, as well as a whole string of surveillance posts. All
together it would need at least one hundred and twenty acres and an infrastructure capable of supplying the enormous quantities
of water and electricity that would be necessary.

The Kali Grounds met all these conditions. But the Argentinian was against the site. “I’d lost the battle over the size of
the factory,” he would say. “But at least I could try and stop it being built too close to areas where people were living.”
The officials of the Madhya Pradesh government rolled out the red carpet. The arrival of a multinational as prestigious as
Union Carbide was an extraordinary godsend for the town and the region. It meant millions of dollars for the local economy
and thousands of jobs. Ratna Nadar, along with all the other residents of the bustees, would be kept in work for years.

Together with Muñoz, the Carbide team who had come from New York examined several sites suggested by the authorities. None
of them was really satisfactory. In one place the water supply was inadequate; in another the electricity was wanting; elsewhere
the ground was not firm enough to bear the weight of construction. That was when the residents of Orya and its neighboring
bustees witnessed cars mysteriously coming and going from the Kali Grounds. The vehicles frequently paused to let their occupants
out. This activity went on for several days, then stopped. The envoys from New York had finally overcome Muñoz’s reservations.
Of course the Kali Grounds, next to the formulation works, was the right place to build the plant. As for any risk to those
living nearby if an accident were to occur, the New York envoys reassured Muñoz that his fears were totally unfounded.