BBC - Adam Curtis - Pandora's Box (1992)

Pandora's Box, subtitled A fable from the age of science, is a six part 1992 BBC documentary television series written and produced by Adam Curtis, which examines the consequences of political and technocratic rationalism.

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Part 1: The Engineer's Plot

This part chronicles how the revolutionaries who toppled the Tsar in 1917 attempted to industrialize and control the Soviet Union with rational scientific methods.
The bolsheviks wanted to transform the Soviet people into scientific beings. Aleksei Gastev used social engineering, and even a social engineering machine, to teach people to behave in a rational way.

Part 2: To The Brink of Eternity

This episode outlines how the US government attempted to use systems analysis and game theory to develop strategies to control the nuclear threat and nuclear arms race during the Cold War.

Part 3: The League of Gentlemen

In the late 1970s, a group of economists managed to convince Margaret Thatcher and other British politicians that they had foolproof technical means to make Britain great again.

Part 4: Goodbye Mrs Ant

This part focuses on attitudes to nature and tells the story of the insecticide DDT, which was first seen as a savior to humankind in the 1940s, only to be claimed as a part of the destruction of the entire ecosystem in the late 60s. It also outlines how the the sciences of entomology and ecology were transformed by political and economic pressures.

Part 5: Black Power

A look at how former Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah 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 dam, generating enough power to transform West Africa into an industrialized utopia. A scheme was drawn up together with Kaiser Aluminum, but as his grand experiment took shape, it brought with it dangerous forces Nkrumah couldn't control, and he slowly watched his metropolis of science sink into corruption and debt.

Part 6: A is For Atom

An insight into the history of nuclear power. In the 1950s scientists and politicians thought they could create a different world with a limitless source of nuclear energy. But things began to go wrong. Scientists in America and the Soviet Union were duped into building dozens of potentially dangerous plants. Then came the disasters of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl which changed views on the safety of this new technology.

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A 6 episode TV-rip encoded in 640x480 XVID.