ABSTRACT
The deaths referred to by the Comptroller were those of the Apollo space capsule crew, who perished in a fire during practice drills in January 1967, and the crew of the Soyuz XI space capsule who died following the capsule’s decompression during re-entry in June 1971. Since the writing of that letter, other examples have illustrated only too clearly our inability to predict accurately the probability of disaster scenarios occurring. For example, Three Mile Island (28 March 1979), Bhopal (3 December 1984), Chernobyl (26 April 1986), the space shuttle Challenger (28 January 1986) and the explosion in Guadalajara, Mexico (22 April 1992)—to mention but a few.
