=Chapters 15 and 16=
==Piranava Abeyakaran==
1) In Chapter 15 of //Alchemy of Air//, Haber is beaten and dismayed. Before Clara had committed suicide, Haber had developed an affinity for Charlotte Nathan. When Clara committed suicide, Haber married Charlotte, whom Haber didn’t understand that well either. In addition, Germany had lost World War I. Haber had heard that he was on a list as a war criminal so he quickly fled with his family. Regardless of many people’s dislike, Haber had won the Nobel Prize for his work on the Haber-Bosch process. However, things weren’t so great again. The Treaty of Versailles was a peace agreement that officially brought WWI to an end. It made Germany pay 132 billion gold marks. This was an unfathomable amount,
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Whether the learning experience justified the deaths or doesn’t depends on perspective. If you ask someone who was related to a worker that had died, they would most likely say that it wasn’t worth it. I doubt the Oppau workers were engrossed by the process that they were willing to die for the scientific cause. In fact, many of the workers had been quickly trained to do specific jobs so they didn’t really know what the whole process was about. If the lessons learned at Oppau saved more lives than it had taken, I would say it was worth it. However, Oppau was caused by poor practices so it was destined to cause an accident at some point, maybe not of the same magnitude. Another industrial disaster that mirrors Oppau was the Texas City disaster. In 1947, a cargo ship carrying ammonium nitrate exploded, causing a chain reaction of explosions and a huge shock. About 600 people had died from the explosion. The shockwave could be felt for more than 150 miles. It cost about $1.07 billion dollars ($100 million back then) for reconstruction costs. Perhaps the largest industrial disaster was the Bhopal disaster. Several disasters have happened, many of which could have been prevented. Some have taught lessons that have saved many more