Bright Triumphs, Dark Disasters, 1980–1991

The 1980s did celebrate space achievements and Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web. But after those memorable events, this decade brought major technological disasters. The Union Carbide gas leak at Bophal, India, in December 1984 killed almost 4,000 immediately. The wreck of the Exxon Valdez off the coast of Alaska in 1988 cost the lives of countless ocean birds and mammals and left 11 million gallons of oil in the ocean. The darkest event was history’s worst nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, Ukraine, on April 26, 1986. An eighteen square-mile area surrounding the nuclear plant and its contiguous town Pripyat was made a no-man’s land, not being safe to return for 3,000 years. One last tragedy of the 1980s was the dropping of poison gas on Iraqi Kurds living in the city of Halabja during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988). The attack killed 3,200 to 5,000 Kurds; 210,000 were injured. The Iraq High Criminal Court in 2010 acknowledged that the Halabja massacre was an act of genocide.