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. It won a BAFTA for Best Factual Series in 1993.

Curtis deals with, in order: Communism in the Soviet Union, systems analysis and game theory during the Cold War, the 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.

The documentary makes extensive use of clips from the short film Design for Dreaming, especially in the title sequence. Curtis's later series The Century of the Self and The Trap have similar themes to Pandora's Box.

Background Adam Curtis explained the background to the series: "I grew up in the late Fifties and Sixties. To me, the scientist was a heroic figure in a white coat, who stood proudly in a gleaming laboratory. 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".

Pandora's Box was the first work by Adam Curtis to showcase his subsequently distinctive visual style. He explained: "in Pandora’s Box I wanted to make a sort of funny film about economics. I was just starting out in TV and was almost in tears when editing because I could find nothing to illustrate it and I thought I was going to be sacked. Out of that desperation I started raiding the BBC archive, I remember I even had talking squirrels in it at one point. Stylistically, a lot was born out of that necessity to get things done to a deadline."

Episodes

Part 1. 'The Engineers' Plot' This episode, originally broadcast on 11 June 1992, details how the Bolshevik revolutionaries who came into power in 1917 attempted to industrialise and control the Soviet Union with rational scientific methods. The Bolsheviks wanted to turn the Soviet people into scientific beings. Aleksei Gastev used social engineering, including a social engineering machine, to make people more rational.

But Bolshevik politicians and bourgeois engineers came into conflict. Lenin said, "The communists are not directing anything — they are being directed." Stalin arrested 2000 engineers in 1930, eight of whom were convicted in the Industrial Party show trial. Engineering schools gave those loyal to the party only limited training in engineering, to minimise their potential political influence. Industrialised America was used as a template to develop the Soviet Union. Magnitogorsk was built to closely replicate the steel mill city Gary, Indiana. A former worker describes how they went so far as to create metal trees since trees could not grow on the steppe.

By the late 1930s, Stalin-faithful engineers like Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin and Nikita Khrushchev grew in influence, due to Stalin eliminating many earlier Bolshevik engineers. They aimed to use engineering in line with Stalin's policies to plan the entire country. At Gosplan, the head institution of central planning, engineers predicted future rational needs. Vitalii Semyonovich Lelchuk, from the USSR Academy of Sciences, describes the level of detail as absurd, "Even the KGB was told the quota of arrests to be made and the prisons to be used. The demand for coffins, novels and movies was all planned." The seemingly rational benchmarks began to have unexpected results. When the plan measured tonnes carried per kilometer, trains went on long journeys simply to meet the quota. Sofas and chandeliers increased in size to meet requirements of material usage.

When Nikita Khrushchev took over after Stalin, he tried to make improvements, including considering prices in the plan. The head of the USSR State Committee for Organization and Methodology of Price Creation is shown with a tall stack of price logbooks declaring, "This shows quite clearly that the system is rational." Academician Victor Glushkov proposed the use of cybernetics to control people as a remedy for the problems of planning. In the 1960s, computers began to be used to process economic data. Consumer demand was calculated by computers from data gathered by surveys. But the time delay in the system meant that items were no longer in demand by the time they had been produced.

When Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin took over in the mid-1960s, the economy of the Soviet Union was stagnating. By 1978, the country was in full economic crisis. Production had degenerated to a "pointless, elaborate ritual" and endeavours to improve the plan had been abandoned. 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."

Contributors Vitali Semyonovich Lelchuk, USSR Academy of Sciences Alexei A. Gastev Nikolai Vassilievich Chernobrovov, electrical engineer, 1920s Alexei Leontevich Shatilin, "Hero of the Soviet Union" Lev Emmanuilovich Razgon, former Bolshevik Michael J. Grisak, Gary steelworker, 1930s Rosa Dmitrievna Inkina, construction worker, Magnitogorsk Evgenii A. Ivanov, Senior Manager, USSR Gosplan Valerii Nikolaevich Blinov, managing director, Moscow Toothbrush and Plastic Comb Factory Aleksei Sergeevich Vassiliev, Deputy Managing Director in Charge of Quality, Moscow Toothbrush and Plastic Comb Factory Leonid Pavlovich Katovskii, taxi driver Sergei Mikhailovich Ulanov, Head of Organization and Methodology of Price Creation, USSR State Committee on Prices A. S. Fedorenko, Director, Central Economic-Mathematical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences Abel G. Aganbegyan, economist Dr Alexander Nikolaevich Voronov, Director, All Union Scientific Research Institute for the Study of the Population's Demand for Consumer Goods and the Conjuncture of the Market Dr Vyacheslav Konstantinovich Nefedov, economist Dr Natalya Antonovna Cherkasova, economist

Part 2. 'To The Brink of Eternity' This episode, originally broadcast on 18 June 1992, 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.

The focus is on the men on whom Dr Strangelove was allegedly based: Herman Kahn, Albert Wohlstetter and John von Neumann. These were mathematical analysts employed by the American RAND Corporation to examine issues of America's national security in the nuclear age. They believed the world could be controlled by the scientific manipulation of fear. 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. In the end, their visions were obscured and became the stuff of science fiction fantasy.

Similar material is also covered in the "F**k You Buddy" part of Curtis's later work The Trap, but To The Brink of Eternity has the focus entirely on the nuclear and military aspects of Cold War strategy, such as planning for and against pre-emptive war. John Nash is not mentioned, and the psychological and economical aspects of game theory are not included. As of April 2024, this is the only episode of the series unavailable for public viewing on Adam Curtis' YouTube channel in the United States.

Contributors Samuel T. Cohen, inventor of the neutron bomb Simon Ramo, guided missile engineer, 1950s James A. Thomson, President of RAND Corporation William Gorham, RAND Corporation 1953–1962; Assistant to Secretary of Department of Health, Education and Welfare 1965–68 Albert Wohlstetter, RAND Corporation, 1950s Amelia Musgrove, bar owner, White Sands Thomas Schelling, RAND Corporation 1960–64; Consultant to Department of Defense 1966–70 Debbie Kahn, daughter of Herman Kahn Gail Neale, Hudson Institute, 1960s George Ball, Under-Secretary of State in Kennedy administration 1961–66 William Kaufmann, RAND Corporation; Consultant to Secretary of Defense 1961–80 William Ehrhart, US Marine Corps 1968 Col. David Hackworth, US Army (retired) Herbert York, former Director of Defense Research and Engineering, Department of Defense Jerry Pournelle, chairman, Citizens' Advisory Council on National Space Policy, 1980 Larry Niven, science fiction writer and member of CACNSP Dr Hugh DeWitt, physicist, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Part 3. 'The League of Gentlemen' This part, originally broadcast on 22 June 1992, focuses on how both the Conservative and Labour governments of the 1960s attempted to use economists to engineer economic growth to specific targets, as well as programme post-war economic management in the United Kingdom, and attempts to prevent relative economic decline and the perception of the 1960s Wilson governments that devaluation would jeopardise against national self-esteem.

By the mid-1970s, stagflation emerged to confound the Keynesian theories used by policy makers. 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. The stagflation of the 1970s catapulted the then obscure economic theory of Monetarism to the forefront of political thought. By the late 1970s Milton Friedman had been awarded the Nobel Memorial 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. However, this failed to end inflation straight away, and caused widespread job loss and industrial decline. 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 Conservative Government decided to abandon the Monetarist project and lowered interest rates in an attempt to create jobs. In fact, by the mid-1980s Mrs Thatcher claimed in a television interview that she had "never subscribed" to the theories of Milton Friedman.

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."

Contributors Michael Posner, Economic Adviser to the Treasury 1967–69 Sir Donald MacDougall, Economic Director, N.E.D.C. 1962–64; Director-General, Department of Economic Affairs 1964–68 Reza Moghadam, London School of Economics Prof. Charles Goodhart, Economic Adviser to the Department of Economic Affairs 1965–67; Chief Economic Adviser on Monetary Policy, Bank of England 1980–85 Rt Hon. Tony Benn MP, member of Labour cabinet 1964–70 Brian Reading, Department of Economic Affairs 1964–66 Prof. Alan Budd, Economic Adviser to the Treasury 1970–74 Prof. Milton Friedman, Monetarist economist