posed to the environment by new and existing tech-
nologies. It also increased the demand for new tech-
nologies that could help prevent further disasters, as
well as for new scientific methods for measuring
both the risks of disasters occurring and the precise
effects of the disasters that did occur. In 1984, a
Union Carbide pesticide plant released forty tons of
methyl isocyanate into the atmosphere when a hold-
ing tank overheated, immediately killing nearly three
thousand people in the Indian city of Bhopal and
leading to an estimated fifteen thousand to twenty-
two thousand subsequent deaths. Union Carbide
worked with other companies to create the Respon-
sible Care system, designed to force companies to
act responsibly toward humans and the environ-
ment.
In 1985, the city of Times Beach, Missouri, was
completely evacuated. In 1982, the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) had discovered dangerous
levels of dioxin, which it called “the most dangerous
chemical known to man,” in the town’s soil. The
chemical was believed to be a by-product of the pro-
duction of hexachlorophene. The same year, a hole
in Earth’s protective ozone layer was discovered by
researchers in the Antarctic, whose measurements
indicated a steep drop in ozone layers over a span of
a few years, far larger than any scientist had pre-
dicted. The main source of ozone depletion was de-
termined to be the photodissociation of chlorofluro-
carbon compounds (CFCs). In 1987, forty-three
countries signed the Montreal Protocol, in which
they agreed immediately to freeze CFC production
at its current levels and to reduce their production
levels by 50 percent by 1999. In 1986, a disaster at the
Chernobyl nuclear power plant caused by the explo-
sion of a reactor depopulated areas of the Ukraine
and spewed radioactive material into the atmo-
sphere, exposing parts of the Soviet Union, northern
Europe, western Europe, and the eastern United
States to radioactive fallout.
The emphasis on finding clean forms of energy
and ways to reduce hazardous waste in the 1980’s
sometimes created problems. Eagerness to find al-
ternative energy sources led to results that were diffi-
cult to re-create. In 1988, researchers Stanley Pons
and Martin Fleischman announced the discovery of
cold fusion at the University of Utah. Cold fusion,
known to scientists as low-energy nuclear reactions,
involved the creation of nuclear reactions near
room temperature and pressure using simple, low-
energy devices. When two light nuclei were forced to
fuse, they formed a heavier nucleus, releasing con-
siderable amounts of energy. After a short period of
popular acclaim and widespread media attention,
the researchers were accused of being sloppy in their
initial research when they were unable to reproduce
their results. Efforts by the United States Depart-
ment of Energy to reproduce the results were simi-
larly unsuccessful, although the department would
continue to study the possibility of cold fusion for
the next seventeen years.Space Exploration Early in the 1980’s, the U.S.
space program seemed to be going strong. On No-
vember 12, 1980, the Voyager spacecraft approached
Saturn and sent back the first high-resolution im-
ages of the planet. As emphasis shifted away from
spacecraft for one-time exploration missions, the
space shuttle program was created in order to em-
ploy reusable spacecraft for near-Earth missions.
The following year, on April 12, the first space shut-
tle,Columbia, was launched. In 1984, astronauts
Bruce M. McCandless II and Robert L. Stewart made
the first untethered spacewalk. Early in 1986, the
Voyager 2 space probe made its first contact with
Uranus.
However, public fears of “big science”—massive,
expensive government programs that were perceived
to divert money from social programs—led to the
gradual downscaling of the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration (NASA). When the space
shuttleChallengerexploded seventy-four seconds
after takeoff in 1986, killing the seven astronauts
aboard, public confidence in the merits of such a
program was further shaken. Other countries took
up some of the slack: In February, the Soviet Union
launched the space stationMir, the first consistently
inhabited long-term research facility in space, and
the Japanese spacecraft Suisei approached and ana-
lyzed Halley’s comet. NASA did not resume space
shuttle flights until 1988.
The U.S. space program would receive an unex-
pected boost in the form of President Ronald Rea-
gan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), first pro-
posed in 1983. Its intent was to use ground- and
space-based antiballistic missile weapons systems to
defend the United States from nuclear attack. SDI
was in part spurred by advances in laser technology
made by Livermore Laboratories. In 1984, the
world’s most powerful laser, nicknamed “Nova,” be-The Eighties in America Science and technology 857