| Manpura is among the island barriers between the Bay of Bengal and the mainland of Bangladesh. The inhabitants of this small slice of land have experienced a cyclone, or the threat of a cyclone, almost every year. But in 1970, when the island was still a part of East Pakistan, it was hit by the Great Bhola Cyclone, a fierce storm that arrived with little warning. More than half a million people were killed in its wake, including nearly 80 percent of Manpura's 50,000 residents. The storm came as a surprise not because there wasn't a warning system in place, but because that system was a mess of different international scales. One ranked the storm on a scale of 1 to 4, another was on a 10-point system, and still another used the category "Red 4" to describe the cyclone—the worst storm possible, if you happened to hear this warning and understood what this meant. The warning system failure became a political flashpoint in the Cold War, as Jason Miklian and Scott Carney write in this excerpt from their new book, The Vortex: A True Story of History's Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War and Liberation. Relations between East and West Pakistan were tense, and there was an election scheduled only a few weeks after the storm. Rumors started to swirl—was it politically advantageous for the generals in West Pakistan to allow Bengalis to die? The result was a contested election that swung in favor of the decimated Bengal population, who promoted a more equal democracy. But it also prompted those who still held power to develop a secret plan to make Bengalis pay. Millions of people would be displaced, and tensions in the region would spiral out of control, leading to a Cold War standoff between America and Russia. Michelle Legro | Deputy Editor, Features |
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