A multiple disjunction separates the risks of early industrialization from the hazards of technologically advanced civilisation.1. These latter hazards cannot be delimited spatially, temporally, or socially; they encompass nation-states, military alliances and all social classes, and, by their very nature, present wholly new kinds of challenge to the institutions designed for their control.2. The established rules of attribution and liability – causality and guilt – break down. That means that their careful application to research and jurisdiction has the contrary effect: the hazards increase and their anonymization is legitimated.3. The hazards can only be minimized by technological means, never ruled out. In an age of worldwide growth of large-scale technological systems, the least likely event will occur in the long run. The technocracy of hazard squirms in the thumbscrews of the safety guarantees which it is forced to impose on itself, and tighten time and again in the mass-media spotlight of the bureaucratic welfare state.4. The lack of provision for catastrophe plainly exposes the paradigm error, the bewitchment of reason caused by the false belief that the twentieth century is only the continuation of the nineteenth. If the rafters are on fire, the fire brigade will arrive, the insurance company will pay, the necessary medical attention and so forth will be given.This security system, which anticipates social provision for the worst conceivable case, broke down with the advent of large-scale (nuclear, chemical, ecological, genetic) hazards. Accidents now frequently cause irreversible damage and destruction that may have a determinable beginning but no foreseeable end. Yet it is not only ‘accident’ statistics that fail to address the historically unprecedented fact of artificial disasters of undeterminable extent; the guiding idea of economic compensation, which has prevailed hitherto, also fails to meet the case.