Pandora’s Box

Pandora’s Box — A fable from the age of science, is a six part series examining the consequences of political and technocratic rationalism, tying together communism in the Soviet Union, systems analysis and game theory during the Cold War, economy in the United Kingdom during the 1970s, the insecticide DDT, Kwame Nkrumah’s leadership in Ghana during the 1950s and 1960s and the history of nuclear power.

Series

The revolutionaries who toppled the Tsar in 1917 thought science held the key to their new era. In fact, it ended up creating a bewildering world for millions of Soviet people…

Scientists at the American RAND Corporation believe nuclear war can be managed and controlled by the scientific manipulation of fear using systems analysis and game theory…

A group of economists manage to convince British politicians that they have a foolproof technical means to make Britain great again based on the scientific models of the RAND corporation…

Should we let scientists be the prime movers of social and political change when DDT made post-war heroes of American scientists only to be put on trial by other scientists in 1968?

Kwame Nkrumah sets Africa ablaze with his vision of a new industrial, scientific age. But as his grand experiment takes shape, he slowly watches his metropolis of science sink into corruption and debt…

Now the scientists and politicians attempt to create a different world with limitless sources of nuclear energy. This too fails with the disasters of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl…