Dominique Lapierre - Five Past Midnight in Bhopal: The Epic Story of the Worlds Deadliest Industrial Disaster

Copyright 2002 by Pressinter S.A. and Sesamat Worldwide Rights S.A.

All rights reserved.

WARNER BOOKS

Hachette Book Group

237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

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First eBook Edition: April 2009

ISBN: 978-0-446-56124-2

Other books by

Dominique Lapierre and Javier Moro

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A Thousand Suns

Beyond Love

The City of Joy

Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins

The Fifth Horseman

Freedom at Midnight

O Jerusalem

Or Ill Dress You in Mourning

Is Paris Burning?

Javier Moro

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The Jaipur Foot

Los Senderos de la Libertad

To the heroes of the Orya Bustee,
of Chola and of Jai Prakash Nagar.

F irst and foremost we would like to express our immense gratitude to our wives, Dominique and Sita, who shared every moment of our long and difficult research and who were our irreplaceable helpers in the preparation of this work.

Heartfelt appreciation to Colette Modiano, Paul and Manuela Andreota, Pascaline Bressan, Michel Gourtay, Mari Carmen Doate, Eugenio Suarez and Antonio Ubach, who spent long hours correcting our manuscript and gave us their encouragement.

A very special thank you to Antoine Caro for his exceptional assistance with the preparation of this book, as well as to Pierre Amado for his valuable advice on India.

This book is the fruit of patient research both in the United States and in India. In the United States we would like particularly to thank engineer Warren Woomer and his wife Betty who made us welcome in their charming house in South Charleston, enabling us to reconstruct the happy years when Warren was in charge of the Bhopal factory. Similarly we would like to thank engineer Eduardo Muoz for our innumerable meetings in San Francisco and at his villa in Sausalito, in the course of which we were able to reconstruct, almost day by day, the adventure of establishing a high-tech pesticide plant in the heartland of India, and Muozs fight to limit its size and the dangers involved.

Again in the United States, we would like to thank Halcott P. Foss and engineers Jean-Luc Lemaire and William K. Frampton, for having opened wide the doors to the Institute 2 factory, the Bhopal plants elder sister, where Sevin is still produced from deadly methyl isocyanate. Additional thanks go to Jean-Luc Lemaire and to Ren Crochard for the illuminating explanations that facilitated the writing of the technical parts of our book. We include in this American tribute Ward Morehouse and David Dembo who, from their small East River office in New York, conduct an unrelenting struggle to make the truth about the Bhopal disaster known and who generously gave us access to their precious archives. And we would like to express our gratitude to Kathy Kramer for having placed at our disposal documentation concerning the Boyce Thompson Institute in Yonkers where the Sevin, which was to wipe out insects ravaging the harvests of peasants throughout the world, was invented.

Among all the Indian engineers who took part in the adventure of Bhopals beautiful plant, our gratitude is due primarily to Kamal Pareek for the entire days we spent together, reconstructing in every little detail the extraordinary hope that the Bhopal factory had brought with it, the subsequent slow agony and the eventual catastrophe. Grateful thanks also go to engineers Umesh Nanda and John Luke Couvaras who patiently shared their memories and entrusted numerous unpublished documents to us. We would similarly like to express out gratitude to Jagannathan Mukund who was the factorys last managing director and who allowed us to bombard him with questions for three days on his Conoor property in the mountains of the Nilgiris in southern India.

Naturally a very large part of our research was conducted in Bhopal itself, where the assistance of Satinath Sarangi and his team of record keepers from the Sambhavna Trust was indispensable to us, as were the generous help and hospitality of Farah Khan and her mother Niloufar Khan, Begum Rachid, Bano and Yadar Raachid Uzzafar Khan, Sonia and Nader Raachid Uzzafar Khan, as well as Mr. and Mrs. Balthazar de Bourbon, Enamia, Kamlesh Jamaini, the chronicler Nasser Kamal, Manish Mishra and Dr. Zahir ul-Islam who helped us uncover the secrets of the culture and legendary past of their beautiful city.

We wish to thank also his excellency Mr. Digvijay Singh, the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, for his warm reception, and all those who so generously helped us in the various aspects of our research. By alphabetical order: M.M. Shyam Babu, K.D. Ballal in Bangalore, Dr. Bambhal, Sudeep Banerjee, Sajda Bano, Ahmed Bassi, Dr. Bhandari, Praful Bidwai, N.M. Buch, Father Dennis Carneiro, Amar Chand, Dr. Heeresh Chandra, T.R. Chouhan, S.P. Chowdhary, Mr. Chughtai, Deena Dayalan and the staff of The Other Media, Mr. Diwedi, Dr. Banu Dubey, R.K. Dutta, Dr. Deepak Gandhe, Brigadier Garg, Subashe Godane, V.P. Gokhale from Eveready, Ahsan Hussain, Santosh Katiyar, Rehman Khan, Colonel Gurcharan Singh Khanuja, Rajkumar Keswani, Dr. Loya, Dr. N.P. Mishra, Dr. Nagu, Shekil Qureshi, Ganga and Dalima Ram, Dr. Rajanarayan, Salar, Dr. Sarkar, Dr. Satpathy, Arvind Shrivastava, V.N. Singh, Commissioner Ranjit Singh, S.K. Trehan, Dr. Trivedi, Dr. Varadajan, Mohan Lal Varma, Rev. Timothy Wankhede.

Union Carbides management in India and the United States failed to respond to our requests for interviews and information.

By contrast, we are grateful to the Rhne-Poulenc division of Aventis, which took over the proprietorship of the Institute 2 factory in the United States, and to its director for agro-international public relations, Georges Santini, for having generously received us both in Institute 2 and at the research department in Lyon. We include in our appreciation Christine Giulani, in charge of public relations for Dow Agro Sciences, for the warm welcome provided at the Letcombe Regis laboratories in Great Britain.

We want to thank also our friends who made our travels and stays in India so productive and pleasant: M.M. Sanjay Basu and all the staff at Far Horizon, Ranvir Bhandari, Audrey Daver, Bharat Dhruv, Madan Kak and the whole staff of TCI, Sanjiv Malhotra, Sunil Mukherjee, Gilbert Soulaine and Gilles Renard.

We address our special gratitude to those who help us so generously in our humanitarian work: their excellencies the ambassadors Bernard de Montferrand and Kanwal Sibal, Mary Allizon, Rina and Takis Anoussis, David Backler and the Foundation Marcelle and Jean Coutu, Otto Barghezi, Jamshed Bhabha, Drs. Franoise Baylet-Vincent, Angela Bertoli, Henri-Jean Philippe and their benevolent friends of the organizations Gyncologie sans Frontires and Pathologie, Cytologie et Dveloppement, Lon and Dick Behr, Nicolas Borsinger and the Foundation ProVictimis, Pierre Ceyrac, Kathryn and John Coo, Gaston Dayanand, Peter and Richard Dreyfus, Behram and Mani Dumasia, Catherine and David Graham, Priti Jain, Mohammed Kamruddin and the whole team of UBA, Adi and Jeroo Katgara, Ashwini and Renu Kumar, Franois Laborde and the whole team of HSP, Ila Lumba, Michle Migone and all the Friends of Italy, Christina Mondadori and the Foundation Benedetta dIntino, Aman Nath, Aloka Pal, Sabitri Pal, Shirin Paul, Mohammed Abdul Wohab and the whole staff of SHIS, Gaston Roberge, June and Paul Shorr, James Stevens and the whole team of Udayan, Sukhesi Didi and the whole staff of Belari, Ratan Tata, chairman of the Tata Group, Suzanne and Alexander Van Meerwijk, Francis Wacziarg, Harriet and Larry Weiss and all those who prefer to remain anonymous.