After Holocaust, Who Pays?

A small but real chance of catastrophic accident rides with many a military and scientific program. Nuclear weapons have already been involved in at least ten accidents -- always, so far, without exploding, though one 24-megaton bomb jettisoned by a B-52 was reportedly found in a field with five of its six safety interlocks set off. Such peace able activities as weather control have taken risks with equally destructive energies, as when the early Project Cirrus seeded an Atlantic hurricane with dry ice, only to have it veer 120DEG to sideswipe a thinly populated stretch of Georgia coast. Yet if a large-scale disaster actually does occur in a Government program, the injured public has no assurance of compensation.

Whom could future disaster victims sue? The Federal Tort Claims Act establishes that the Government is liable at most for proved negligence of its employees. Contractors, except a few working for the Atomic Energy Commission or doing Defense Department research, are on their own; if their products are at fault in a catastrophe, they can be liable for enough to outstrip any conceivable insurance and bankrupt them many times over. But to collect even a few cents on the dollar, the victim would probably face the staggering job of pinning down in court exactly which of perhaps dozens of contractors and subcontractors were actually to blame.

The small chance became thundering reality in Texas City in 1947, when two shiploads of ammonium nitrate fertilizer blew up in the harbor, setting off fires and further explosions that killed 512 people, wounded more than 3,500. The dreary legal aftermath of that holocaust is recalled in a new study of Government liability by Columbia University's Legislative Drafting Research Fund, which points out that Texas City victims waited nine years for their first penny of Government compensation. After the Supreme Court ruled they could not collect under the Tort Claims Act, a special act of Congress allowed them just $16,698,000 against damages estimated up to $300 million.

What is needed, the research report urges, is a new law for direct Government compensation so that disaster victims can get partial payment with emergency speed, with determination of the full amount later. Contractors would still be liable up to a ceiling of perhaps $10 million. Beyond that the Government, ultimate sponsor of the ultrahazardous programs, would pay--and pay.

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