104 Theory,Culture Society contradiction between highly developed safety bureaucracies on the one hand,and the open legalization of previously unseen,gigantic threats on the other,without any possibility of after-care.A society which is oriented from top to toe toward security and health is confronted with the shock of their diametrical opposites,destruc- tion and threats which scorn any precautions against them Two contrary lines of historical development are converging in late twentieth-century Europe:a level of security founded on the perfection of techno-bureaucratic norms and controls,and the spread and challenge of historically new hazards which slip through all the meshes of law,technology and politics.This contradiction, which is not of a technical,but a social and political character, remains hidden in the 'confusion of centuries'(Gunther Anders). And this will continue so long as the old industrial patterns of rationality and control last.It will break up to the extent that improbable events become probable.'Normal catastrophes'is the name Charles Perrow(1982)gives in his book to this predictability with which what was considered impossible occurs-and the more emphatically it is denied,the sooner,more destructively and shock- ingly it occurs.In the chain of publicly revealed catastrophes, near-catastrophes,whitewashed security faults and scandals the technically centred claim to the control of governmental and indus- trial authority shatters -quite independently of the established measure of hazards:the number of dead,the danger of the contami- nations and so on. The central social-historical and political potential of ecological, nuclear,chemical and genetic hazards lies in the collapse of adminis- tration,in the collapse of techno-scientific and legal rationality and of institutional political security guarantees which those hazards conjure up for everyone.That potential lies in the unmasking of the concretely existing anarchy which has grown out of the denial of the social production and administration of mega-hazards.? Hazards of the nuclear and chemical age,therefore,have a social as well as a physical explosiveness.As the hazards appear,the insti- tutions which are responsible for them,and then again not responsi- ble,are pressed into competition with the security claims they are compelled to issue,a competition from which they can only emerge as losers.On the one hand,they come under permanent pressure to make even the safest things safer;on the other hand,this overtaxes expectations and sharpens attention,so that in the end not only accidents,but even the suspicion of them,can cause the facades of Downloaded from lcs.sagepub.com at Shanghai Jiaotong University on June 17,2012Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Shanghai Jiaotong University on June 17, 2012