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Private Notes
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.
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.
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.
This part, originally broadcast on 2 July 1992, focuses on attitudes to nature and tells the story of the insecticide DDT, which was first seen as a saviour to humankind in the 1940s, only to be claimed as a part of the destruction of the entire ecosystem in the late 1960s. It also outlines how the sciences of entomology and ecology were transformed by political and economic pressures.
The penultimate episode, originally broadcast on 9 July 1992, 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.
This final episode, originally broadcast on 16 July 1992,[10] is named after a 1953 General Electric promotional film called A Is for Atom. The episode gives 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 started to go wrong. Scientists in America and the Soviet Union were duped into building dozens of potentially dangerous nuclear power plants. For business reasons, General Electric and Westinghouse decided that the types sold would be versions based on the reactors used in nuclear submarines, but sold with dubious claims made about their cost effectiveness and safety.
