Pandora's Box, subtitled A Fable From the Age of Science, is a BBC television documentary series by Adam Curtis looking at the consequences of political and technocratic rationalism.

[1] Curtis deals with, in order: Communism in the Soviet Union, systems analysis and game theory during the Cold War, economy of the United Kingdom during the 1970s, the insecticide DDT, Kwame Nkrumah's leadership in Ghana in the 1950s, and the history of nuclear power.

Everyone was captivated by the idea that science could be used to build a better world ... since then, the image has been severely tainted, and for me, Pandora's Box will aim to find out why".

"[3] This episode, originally broadcast on 11 June 1992,[4] details how the Bolshevik revolutionaries who came into power in 1917 attempted to industrialise and control the Soviet Union with rational scientific methods.

The narrator says, "What had begun as a grand moral attempt to build a rational society ended by creating a bizarre, bewildering existence for millions of Soviet people."

This episode, originally broadcast on 18 June 1992,[5] outlines how the United States government and its departments attempted to use systems analysis and game theory to develop strategies to control the nuclear threat and nuclear arms race during the Cold War, and, more specifically, to manage the "loss of control" crises encountered during events such as the Space Race, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War.

These were mathematical analysts employed by the American RAND Corporation to examine issues of America's national security in the nuclear age.

One problem, however, was the seemingly unpredictable and irrational nature of politicians, societies, and individuals, which rendered elements of the theory difficult to apply, as well as the challenge of finding accurate, impartial, and unmodified data on which to base concise predictions.

Meanwhile, a group of economists had managed to convince Margaret Thatcher, Keith Joseph and other British politicians that they had foolproof technical means to make Britain 'great' again.

By the late 1970s Milton Friedman had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics and even some Labour politicians were claiming that government attempts to grow the economy by injecting capital was doing more harm than good by driving up inflation.

In 1979, Margaret Thatcher came to power and began to implement these new economic theories to drive down inflation by cutting government spending and raising interest rates, thus tightening the money supply.

By the early 1980s, unemployment had risen to 2.5 million, British industrial output had declined by 1/6, and large-scale riots had begun to break out in Britain.

The episode ends with many of the economists involved in the ill-fated attempts to manage the economy arriving at the same conclusion their predecessors had 30 years before: they could only prevent an economic disaster, not engineer growth.

Other economists point out that other countries' successes had more to do with focusing on improving their education systems and industrial bases rather than large-scale attempts to engineer the entire nation's economy.

Another economist and adviser to Margaret Thatcher, Alan Budd, worries that the whole Monetarist project might simply have been an attempt to reduce the economic and political power of the working class by raising unemployment and lowering wages, or as he puts it, "creating a reserve army of labour."

Chemical companies portrayed the human battle against insects as a struggle for existence, and their promotional films in the 1950s invoke Charles Darwin.

In 1962, biologist Rachel Carson released the book Silent Spring, which was the first serious attack on pesticides and outlined their harmful side effects.

[9] Hugh Iltis describes how, in 1969, a scientist testified at the hearing about how DDT appears in breast milk and accumulates in the fat tissue of babies.

Twenty years later, the story of DDT continues with a press conference announcing the halting of construction in a skyscraper due to a nesting peregrine falcon being found there.

Joan Halifax[10] talks about ecology as a gift to human beings and all species, a moral lesson that gave rise not to utopia, but ecotopia.

Politics professor Langdon Winner theorises that social ideals are being read back to us as if they were lessons derived from science itself.

The penultimate episode, originally broadcast on 9 July 1992,[11] looks at how Kwame Nkrumah, the leader of the Gold Coast (which became Ghana on independence from the United Kingdom in 1957) from 1952 to 1966, set Africa ablaze with his vision of a new industrial and scientific age.

At the heart of his dream was to be the huge Volta River dam, generating enough power to transform West Africa into an industrialised utopia and focal point of post-colonial Pan-Africanism.

A scheme was finally drawn up offering Kaiser Aluminum favourable conditions (including the smelting of aluminium imported from outside Ghana) and the dam was opened to great fanfare in January 1966.

Weeks later, in February 1966, while Nkrumah was on a state visit to North Vietnam and China, his government was overthrown in a military coup (possibly CIA backed), and evidence of massive corruption and debt was revealed.

Under his leadership, Anatoly Petrovich Alexandrov designed cheap reactors that were produced at high speed, with very few safety features, sometimes not even containment vessels.

Nevertheless, they had not necessarily proved that they wouldn't work on a real reactor, so they decided to carry on with mandated safety systems, that the best evidence suggested, may well not function in the event of an accident.