Chernobyl was not the first such health event to result from the introduction of dangerous technologies into contemporary life. The nuclear release at Three Mile Island; the chemical releases at Seveso, Italy; the explosion at Bhopal, India; and the pollution of the water table at Love Canal in the United States all come to mind.
The disturbing nature of these events is traceable to their origin in the malfunctions of human-designed and -maintained machines. Unlike the infectious retrovirus, the operations of a nuclear reactor are well understood. Similarly, the effects of the toxic gas used in the production of pesticides at Bhopal were perfectly predictable. In such cases, a series of human errors and equipment failures combined to bring about the disaster. At both Chernobyl and Bhopal there was little oversight or effective regulation. Mandated safety standards by the state were ignored owing partly to a lack of the technical and institutional resources necessary to achieve compliance.
This sort of crisis strikes at a weak point in the political superstructure of the society of market-states, its moral vulnerability. At Bhopal, Chernobyl, and elsewhere, the lives of persons whose economic worth was negligible were put at risk in order to provide cheap chemicals to agriculture or cheap power to electricity consumers. So long as it is profitable to do so, we can expect multinational corporations to draw the calculus of safety no more expensively than the global possibilities of relocation demand, and we can expect state enterprises to do the same (because even though they cannot relocate, they must compete against the global multinationals).
Here too, however, there is hope. Chernobyl was a national failure, prompted as much by the shortcomings of Russian technology as by the inevitability of accidents. The society of market-states would be able in principle to deploy technicians within a global market, denying dangerous technologies to those states that do not provide adequate safeguards and helping poorer states to maintain the complex equipment that may be located there.