Defending the Indefensible: The Global Asbestos Industry and Its Fight for Survival (review)

Jock McCulloch and Geoffrey Tweedale are both familiar to historians of asbestos. McCulloch, a professor of history at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, is the author of Asbestos—Its Human Cost (1986) and Asbestos Blues (2002). Tweedale, a reader in business history at Manchester Metropolitan University, is the author of Magic Mineral to Killer Dust (2000). Their account of the asbestos industry is drawn mainly from litigation discovery documents, articles in medical journals, and personal interviews from the United States, Australia, Europe, South America, South Africa, and the United Kingdom.

The central argument is stated on the dust jacket: "asbestos has proved so enduring because the industry was able to mount a successful defence strategy for the mineral. … This defence involved the shaping of the public debate by censoring, and sometimes corrupting, scientific research, nurturing scientific uncertainty, and using allies in government, insurance and medicine." McCulloch and Tweedale heap scorn on claims that the naturally occurring mineral has unique properties, arguing that "substitutes … had been around for decades," indeed "throughout the twentieth century" (pp. 14 and 115–16), and that "the major appeal of asbestos to manufacturers lay in its low cost and that in turn derived from the conditions under which it was mined" (p. 23, and see also pp. 41, 82, 116, 120, 139, 229, and 260).

It is clear that, under the apartheid conditions the authors describe, asbestos miners in South Africa were exploited and exposed to conditions that American, British, and Canadian workers would not have been expected to endure. But there are significant flaws in the rest of their master narrative of alleged conspiracy and deceit, chiefly the confident assertions regarding the fire safety and engineering issues associated with asbestos, which are entirely unsupported by data from the engineering literature. Of the more than 450 sources listed in the bibliography, not one is a building code, engineering standard, or article from an engineering publication.

First, contrary to one of their central premises, asbestos was considerably more expensive than other insulation materials. McCulloch and Tweedale propose asbestos-free mineral wool, rock wool, fiberglass, and organic materials as could-have-been substitutes, although none of these materials had thermal, chemical, or electrical properties comparable to those of asbestos, and they were not code-compliant in industrial nations for high temperature service. Historical prices to manufacturers and consumers reflected asbestos's higher performance ratings. According to Means Building Construction Cost Data, which tracks U.S. building materials and labor costs, code-compliant asbestos-containing pipe covering cost, in 1957, 98 cents per square foot, while four-inch-thick rock wool and two-inch-thick glass fiber batts were, respectively, 12 and 19 cents per square foot. Boiler insulation consisting of asbestos in calcium silicate was even more expensive, at $1.85 per square foot. Relative prices were comparable in later years.

The second major difficulty concerns substitutability. If, as McCulloch and Tweedale repeatedly claim, other insulation materials were equivalent, why were asbestos-containing materials consistently required by fire insurers, by federal, state, and municipal building codes, and by engineering standards throughout the industrial world until the late 1980s? Building codes from New Zealand to New York State cited the failure of mineral and rock wools, glass fiber, and all organic materials to pass fire tests of their properties. These tests were carried out in many countries between 1883 and 1990 and were copiously documented in the engineering literature that McCulloch and Tweedale do not cite. While they argue that governments were in collusion with manufacturers, this does not seem adequate to explain the persistent failure of the proposed substitutes to pass standard engineering performance tests, despite strong market incentives for the insulation industry to develop asbestos-free products after strict liability in the United States emerged from Borel v. Fibreboard in 1973.

Defending the Indefensible has numerous smaller errors, omissions, internal contradictions, and technical gaffes, such as the authors...