Pandora’s Box (1992)
Notes to accompany ‘Pandora’s Box: A Fable from the Age of Science’ by Adam Curtis
Episode One: ‘The Engineers’ Plot’
In 1920, Lenin said, ‘Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.’
In Literature and Revolution, Trotsky says, ‘The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx.’ Curtis says that he was talking about the power of science, but I’m not sure from looking at the paragraph in question.
Much of the rationalization drive was inspired by the ‘scientific organization of labour’, known by its Russian acronym NOT, an adaptation of F. W. Taylor’s theory of ‘scientific management’. This was one of the more egregious expressions of the ‘productivist’ strain within Bolshevism that perceived the social organization of labour inherited from capitalism, with its particular productivity techniques and technologies, to be perfectly compatible with socialism. One of its chief proponents, A. K. Gastev, a former syndicalist and ‘worker‐poet’, ran the Central Institute of Labour from 1920: ‘In the social sphere we must enter the epoch of precise measurement, formulae, blueprints, controlled calibration, social norms.’ (The Russian Revolution: A Very Short Introduction)
Curtis says that power passed from the workers to the bourgeois specialists, ‘who were still dominant in the technical and managerial positions so crucial to the Soviet Union’s transformation into a modern industrialized country’ (The Soviet Union: A Very Short Introduction).
In 1928, the first five‐year plan was introduced [ratified December 1927]. It transformed Soviet agriculture and industry: collective and state farms were imposed, and industrialization was accelerated. (World Encyclopedia)
Magnitogorsk: ‘Built (1929–31) under the first Five-Year Plan on the site of iron deposits, the city became a symbol of Soviet industrial growth’ (The Columbia Encyclopedia). ‘[O]ne of the world’s largest integrated metallurgical plants’ (Merriam-Webster’s Geographical Dictionary).
In 1930, the bourgeois specialists’ creative freedom turned into a nightmare:
What ensued between 1928 and 1931 was a phase of radical proletarianization that is usually called ‘cultural revolution’ […] A large part of it consisted in negative measures: […] a few hundred ‘bourgeois specialists’ were forced to account for themselves at show trials that were avidly covered in the Soviet press. (The Soviet Union: A Very Short Introduction)
Technology went from being a means to liberation, to being an end in itself – technology = (Stalin’s) power.
The Soviet Union became a nation of engineers.
Magnitogorsk was based on Gary, Indiana, ‘Laid out in 1906 as an extension to the US Steel Corporation plant’ (The Concise Dictionary of World Place-Names). The Soviet Union was not being run on communist lines, but by a technocratic elite of engineered engineers loyal to Stalin. The bourgeois specialists were replaced by younger engineers.
As part of his effort to acquire total power and stigmatize any real or suspected opposition, Joseph Stalin ordered the NKVD to prepare a series of major public trials of Old Bolsheviks. In these show trials in 1936, 1937, and 1938, former close associates of Vladimir Lenin who had led the Russian Revolution of November 1917 and won the civil war of 1918–1921 were tried for treason, sabotage, and murder committed on behalf of Nazi Germany. Leon Trotsky, living in foreign exile, was indicted as a coconspirator, the archfiend responsible for most of the crimes. With one exception, the defendants confessed in open court, and all were immediately shot or deported to the gulag (forced labor camps), where they perished. (Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Intelligence)
Curtis puts the subtitles of his Russian speakers’ words over the top of other images, just as he would if they were speaking English – it works quite well.
Funny line: ‘every toothbrush was planned’.
Planning everything led to absurdities. Khrushchev understood that what made the country function under Stalin, insofar as it did, was not planning but terror.
The state apparatus, destined to ‘wither away’ under Communism, was downgraded (thereby conveniently sidelining [Khrushchev’s] opponents): the central industrial ministries, considered the main source of bureaucratic inertia and inefficiency, were replaced in 1957 by over 100 regional economic councils (sovnarkhozy)[.] (A Dictionary of Political Biography)
But this plan to reform planning failed: regional planning only added to the complexity.
The solution, proposed by Victor Glushkov, was cybernetics (see Machines of Loving Grace).
By 1964 Khrushchev had alienated the military and party élite by his bullying, arbitrary, and often boorish style and constant administrative tinkering and ‘hare-brained schemes’, so in October he was sacked. While he became a ‘non-person’, he was allowed to retire peacefully (a testament to his humanization of Soviet politics), compiling memoirs which managed to reach the West. In his methods Khrushchev remained imprisoned in his Stalinist training, but, nevertheless, he was the most significant Soviet reformer before Gorbachev, albeit in a very different direction—essentially trying to put the clock back, to make the Leninist dream work. This attempt failed because of bureaucratic resistance and his own impatience and mistakes, but mainly because the ideas were even less practicable in the 1960s than they were in the 1920s. (A Dictionary of Political Biography)
Eventually, by the late 1970s, the attempt to plan everything had become a set of absurd and fruitless rituals, and it was abandoned.
Episode Two: ‘To the Brink of Eternity’
Sputnik showed the Americans that the Soviets were a genuine threat in the realm of science. It was the ‘World’s first artificial satellite, launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957’ (World Encyclopedia).
The Soviet achievement stunned the West. The Sputniks demonstrated that the Soviets possessed the rocket and guidance capability for ICBMs, and that by putting a live dog on board, they were well on the way toward putting a man into space. […] Eisenhower […] accelerated the nation’s program to build and deploy ICBMs and authorized the deployment of short-range missiles in Italy and Turkey. Sputnik also prompted him to strengthen American science and its role in policymaking by creating the President’s Science Advisory Committee. (The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science)
RAND strategists became influential (see The Trap).
And John von Neumann (see Machines of Loving Grace and The Trap).
Kriegspiel:
(German, ‘war play’). A word adopted in English for a game introduced in the British army after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. It arose in Switzerland earlier in the 19th century and was played by moving blocks representing parts of armies, guns and the like about on maps. As such it provided useful strategical and tactical training for military students. In c.1900 the word was applied by H.M. Temple to a form of chess in which two players at separate boards play without seeing each other or even being told each other’s moves. They may, however, put a restricted number of questions to an umpire, who sits at a third board. The variant on the traditional form of the game is, however, hardly a ‘war game’. (Brewer’s Dictionary of Modern Phrase and Fable)
This relates to game theory – it is a game in which perfect information does not pertain.
Albert Wohlstetter:
[B]rilliant pioneer thinker in the field of ‘thinking the unthinkable’ with reference to nuclear weapons. He joined the Rand Corporation in 1951 where he worked as a senior policy analyst and carried out a research project about the selection and use of Strategic Air Command’s (SAC) bases, revealing the vulnerabilities of the SAC to surprise attack. This resulted in a change of SAC’s basing policy so that its aircraft were located further from the USSR and better protected. Wohlstetter’s paper also influenced Secretary of Defense [Robert] McNamara to develop the US nuclear deterrent around the concept of first-strike survivability based on Wohlstetter’s dictum, ‘a force cannot deter an attack which it cannot survive’. (The Oxford Companion to Military History)
On the ‘balance of terror’, see The Trap.
McNamara was appointed Secretary of Defense by John F. Kennedy in 1961 and was closely associated with the think-tank theology that produced MAD (mutually assured destruction) and other attempts to make sense of the nuclear weapons dilemma (see Wohlstetter). (The Oxford Companion to Military History)
After briefly supporting a “counterforce” policy of targeting only Soviet missiles, not cities, McNamara reluctantly returned to a deterrence policy of “Mutual Assured Destruction.” [see The Trap] […] In the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, McNamara proposed the selective naval blockade which successfully sealed off the island. (The Oxford Companion to American Military History)
Even if the MAD doctrine succeeded in preventing nuclear wars from being started deliberately (for example, as a preemptive strike or surprise first-strike attack), wars could start as the result of an accident, a misunderstanding, or the breakdown of technology. For example, in the early days of MAD doctrine, when a “fail-safe” system operated, the United States nearly launched a nuclear war against the USSR when the American radar system picked up a flock of migrating Canada geese and mistook the geese for a Soviet surprise attack (The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace)
Herman Kahn:
He studied at the California Institute of Technology and joined the RAND Corp., where he studied the application to military strategy of new analytic techniques such as game theory, operations research, and systems analysis. He won public notice with On Thermonuclear War (1960), in which he contended that thermonuclear war differs only in degree from conventional war and ought to be analyzed and planned in the same way. In 1961 he established the Hudson Institute for research into matters of national security and public policy. (Britannica Concise Encyclopedia)
Thomas Schelling:
Schelling applied game theory methods to global security and arms race and published the results in The Strategy of Conflict (1960). Focussing his game theory application on nuclear powers, Schelling showed that several factors including the initial and employable alternatives affect the negotiation process between these nations. He concluded that a country has to focus on protecting its nuclear weapons rather than its people to demonstrate its ability to respond to a nuclear attack. (Encyclopedia of Nobel Laureates 1901-2017)
The Strategic Defense Initiative:
[A] proposal by President Ronald Reagan on March 23, 1983, to construct a strategic defense system against attack from intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM s), potentially from the Soviet Union. Popularly referred to as “Star Wars” after the science fiction film, the Strategic Defense Initiative was conceived as a way to intercept ICBMs from ground, air, and space using a combination of radar, optical, and infrared detection systems and laser beams. Congress initially approved the program in the 1980s, but political controversy, the fall of the Soviet Union, and problems regarding technological feasibility impeded its progress. (The Oxford Essential Dictionary of the U.S. Military)
Curtis:
The strategists were part of an age that believed political problems could be solved by the application of knowledge. Their success in preventing Armageddon seemed proof that it worked. But they were lucky enough to inhabit a world that was simple; frozen by the deadlock between the superpowers. That odd moment in history is over. And with it has gone the optimistic faith that the world was being changed for the better.
Episode Three: ‘The League of Gentlemen’
The National Economic Development Council:
[A]n organization that operated in the UK from 1962 to 1992 whose objective was to improve the country’s poor economic performance compared to other advanced industrial countries. NEDC was created as a form of economic-planning agency, bringing together the government and both sides of industry, management and the trade unions, with a general remit to identify obstacles to the attainment of improved efficiency and growth and to formulate appropriate means of overcoming them. (Collins Dictionary of Economics)
Bill Phillips designed the Phillips machine,
which he constructed while still an undergraduate […] It was a brilliantly original 7 feet by 5 feet by 3 feet representation of the macroeconomy, one model of which is now displayed near Babbage’s machine in the Science Museum, in South Kensington, London. Oriented around monetary stocks and flows – represented by colored water flowing around plastic pipes – this machine, or MONIAC (Monetary National Income Analogue Computer), offered the opportunity of policy simulation exercises.
Few economists in the postwar period have made such a lasting impression on macroeconomic policy as Alban William Housego (“Bill”) Phillips. The empirical curve, with which he is most often associated, examined wage inflation and unemployment data for the United Kingdom for 1861-1957, with a view to gauging the size of the equilibrant forces that would be necessary to reduce the swing of the business cycle “pendulum”. The idea of an inflation-unemployment “trade-off”, derived by others from his curve, was “snatched at” first by American Keynesians (for example, Samuelson and Solow, 1960) and, in an extraordinarily brief period of time, it became the cornerstone of applied macroeconomics. In the process, much of the subtlety of Phillips’s analysis was replaced by wishful thinking about the potency of macroeconomic manipulation. Phillips’s zero inflation advocacy was likewise replaced by the belief that continuing inflation would purchase sustainable reductions in unemployment. Keynesian advocates, in their moment of apparent triumph, gave a hostage to fortune that Milton Friedman, and others, brilliantly exploited, thus facilitating the monetarist counterrevolution. (An Encyclopedia of Keynesian Economics)
The Conservative government of 1957–63 wanted a technical way of reversing national decline, and it plumped for economic growth – four per cent was the target.
Curtis says that Wilson came to power just as the Conservatives’ boom was overheating. ‘Imports were flooding in and wages rising.’ They should have devalued the pound to make British exports cheaper, but that would have undermined their core mission: ‘to make Britain great again’ (Curtis’s words). There were a series of sterling crises between 1964 and 1967, when, too late, Wilson devalued the pound.
Following the financial crisis of 1967 and the devaluation of the pound, on 19 November Prime Minister Harold Wilson sought to reassure the nation […] [‘]From now the pound abroad is worth 14 per cent or so less in terms of other currencies. It does not mean, of course, that the pound here in Britain, in your pocket or purse or in your bank, has been devalued.[’] The speech was the subject of much mockery by those who viewed devaluation as a national disgrace. (Brewer’s Dictionary of Modern Phrase & Fable)
‘The attempt to plan growth had failed. […] Most economists blamed it on the government’s failure to devalue. Few asked whether the weakness of Britain’s currency was really the symptom of something much deeper, far beyond the power of their techniques to deal with.’
After 1967, the belief at the Treasury that planning was the path to growth was tacitly abandoned. This is another example of things we associate with 1979 happening much earlier.
The most intractable problem [Heath] was to face was that of the British economy, in spite of inheriting a large balance of payments surplus. Income tax was reduced and government expenditure cut: subsidies on council houses were lowered, free school milk ended and the Prices and Incomes Board abolished. Yet as unemployment crept up to a million and high wage settlements pushed up inflation, there was a U-turn in 1971. Anthony Barber, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, tried to create a boom by tax cuts and increased government spending. More was spent on housing, education and the National Health Service than under Labour. There was a consumer spending spree as purchase tax was cut, higher purchase controls abolished and the money supply expanded by 25 per cent in 1972 and again in 1973. There was an explosion in house prices, which in some cases doubled in two years. In 1971 Rolls Royce, facing bankruptcy, was nationalized to keep it afloat and Upper Clyde Shipbuilders received subsidies to protect 3,000 jobs. To check the escalating wage increases and unofficial strikes Heath passed the Industrial Relations Act (1971), which required pre-strike ballots and a 60-day cooling-off period. trade unions had to register, their legal immunities were reduced and there was to be no closed shop. The TUC threatened to expel any union which registered under the new Act, which was rarely invoked and quietly abandoned. In 1972 23 million working days were lost in strikes, the highest number since 1926. Most damaging was the miners’ strike of 1972. The Heath government simply caved in and allowed the miners to win increases of 17-24 per cent. By the winter of 1972-3 Heath, after long talks with the TUC and CBI, had failed to produce a policy of voluntary restraint, and had reverted to a prices and incomes policy. This coincided with the OPEC price rise of 1973, which increased Britain’s already high inflation and produced a balance of payments deficit of £1.5 billion, the highest ever recorded. The dash for growth ended, the fight against inflation took priority and there were large cuts in expenditure. Once again the miners came to the fore. The NUM (National Union of Mineworkers) imposed an overtime ban in November and in February 1974 called for a strike. Heath put industry on a three-day week in December 1973 and in February 1974 held a general election on ‘Who Governs Britain?’ This was unprecedented, as it did not follow a defeat in the Commons. Labour ended up with more seats (301) than the Conservatives (297), though they received fewer votes: for the first time since 1929 no party had an overall majority. Heath tried and failed to do a deal with the Liberals, so the Labour Party came to power as a minority government. (A Dictionary of Contemporary History: 1945 to the Present)
The simultaneous occurrence of accelerating inflation, rising unemployment, and declining productivity growth (stagnation). Until the 1970s, it was widely believed that rates of unemployment and inflation were inversely related—a relationship described by the [Bill] Phillips curve. High rates of unemployment and excess capacity were associated with low rates of wage and price inflation. After 1974, however, rising rates of unemployment were accompanied by accelerating rates of inflation, whence the neologism stagflation. Because the traditional Keynesian economics response to inflation—contractionary aggregate demand policies—proved ineffective in this context, a collective revaluation of Keynesian remedies for problems of excess capacity and inflation became necessary. What later became clear is that the oil crises of the 1970s were a supply shock, and that attempts to reduce aggregate demand could alleviate inflation only at a further cost to output. (Dictionary of the Social Sciences)
Friedman and the Chicago monetarists were waiting in the wings. But Curtis says that Friedman was not denying that the economy worked on explicable scientific principles – he was just saying that he knew what they were. Inflation is ‘a printing press phenomenon. That’s a scientific statement. And you will only have inflation if the quantity of money increases more rapidly than output. You can only stop inflation by slowing down the rate of monetary growth.’ So Curtis thinks the new regime was another act of faith in a technical fix.
One of Margaret Thatcher’s economic advisers was Alan Walters who later defected to the Referendum Party set up by James Goldsmith.
Once Keith Joseph was won round, he toured the country preaching monetarism.
Keith Joseph was that rare British animal, an intellectual in politics. […] He regretted his participation in the Heath government’s introduction of statutory controls on incomes and prices and other measures which weakened the market economy. He was influenced by the writings of Hayek and Milton Friedman and the ideas of the free market Institute of Economic Affairs. […] Some Conservative colleagues were aghast at his claims that government should abandon the goal of full employment—because it was beyond its power to deliver it. They could imagine the charges from political opponents: ‘Sir Keith calls for more unemployment.’ (A Dictionary of Political Biography)
In the 1970s the British government confronted a combination of international financial shocks, high inflation, and increasing levels of unemployment. The Labour government initially responded with state-led demand-management strategies, which ultimately proved ineffective. In 1976, Britain’s economy deteriorated to the point where an International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout was required to keep the country’s currency from completely collapsing. In the months that followed, public officials and citizens alike began raising serious questions about the affordability of maintaining the current welfare state and, more generally, about the proper role and function of government in the economy. When Margaret Thatcher assumed power in 1979, she noted that in nearly 70 per cent of British households, at least one family member received some form of cash welfare benefit. (Public Administration: A Very Short Introduction)
Rational expectations: ‘The assumption that economic actors generally incorporate informed predictions about changes in economic variables into their decisions’ (Dictionary of the Social Sciences).
In 1981, it was agreed that interest rates would have to come down. This would reduce the exchange rate and make exports more competitive. The destruction of the past two years had been for nothing. The government kept up appearances by cutting even more from public spending. Unemployment headed for 2.5 million. Inflation did begin the fall, but the money supply continued its mysterious rise. Curtis: ‘It became clear that the fundamental law of monetarism – the relationship between the money supply and inflation – didn’t work.’
Goodhart’s law:
Originally, an economic theory stating that if a particular definition of the money supply were to be used as the basis for monetary policy, the stability of its statistical relationship with spending on the economy would break down and the policy would prove ineffective. The law is now cited more widely to highlight the problems of focusing on the value of any specific variable as an indicator. In simple terms, when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. (A Dictionary of Finance and Banking)
This was an acknowledgement that it is not possible to predict how an economy will perform. So the City was let loose – unlike the economists, they seemed to know how money worked.
At the end, a conspiracy theory is floated: that perhaps the Thatcherites never believed monetarism could control inflation, but wanted the rise in unemployment for its own sake, to make the unions less powerful.
Episode Four: ‘Goodbye Mrs. Ant’
Thomas Midgley was part of a golden age of chemistry in the 1930s when it appeared that chemists would solve mankind’s problems and feed the world. He was a
US industrial chemist and engineer whose two main discoveries, universally adopted, were later criticized as damaging to the environment. He found in 1921 that tetraethyl lead is an efficient antiknock additive to petrol (preventing pre-ignition in car engines), and in 1930 introduced Freons (a group of chlorofluorocarbons [CFCs]) as the working gases in refrigerators, freezers, and air-conditioning units. (The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia)
For one man to invent two major environmental hazards is curious; and so was his death. A polio victim, he had devised a harness to help him rise in the morning. Becoming in some way entangled in it, he strangled himself. (The Cambridge Dictionary of Scientists)
In 1944, the US Army started mass-producing CFC to help spray a new insecticide called DDT. There was a new war against insects parallel to the new Cold War. But
DDT is not biodegradable, kills many birds, is stored in fatty tissue, is excreted in breast milk, and bioconcentrates at higher levels of terrestrial and marine food chains. In humans, it is hepatotoxic and neurotoxic and possibly genotoxic and carcinogenic. It was banned as an insecticide in the United States and most of Europe in the early 1970s, but is still widely used in low-income nations. (A Dictionary of Public Health)
Silent Spring:
[A] 1962 book by Rachel Carson which drew attention to the danger to the natural environment inherent in the use of toxic chemicals. It refers to a spring with no bird song, because the widespread use of pesticides has had such a devastating effect on the bird population. The book is credited with helping to launch the environmental movement. (A Dictionary of Reference and Allusion)
The roots of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) go back to the gathering of local conservationists and scientists on Long Island, New York. The group (known as the Brookhaven Town Natural Resources Coalition) mobilized to halt the widespread spraying of DDT. Following their local victory in 1967, they incorporated as a non-profit organization and soon went national. With legal actions and scientific studies, they fought against lead additives, the supersonic transport jet, and especially pesticides. In 1980 the EDF had about 40,000 members. In 2000 it had over 300,000 (and a budget of over $28 million). Mainstream EDF sees itself as having “linked science, economics, and law to create innovative, equitable, and cost-effective solutions to the most urgent environmental problems”. The EDF has a long history of seeking out corporate partners, such as McDonald’s, BP Amoco, and United Parcel Service. Since the 1980s, the EDF has been a leading advocate of economic incentives rather than regulations to solve environmental problems, such as acid rain, global warming, and endangered species. In 2000 the EDF shortened its official name to Environmental Defense. (International Encyclopedia of Environmental Politics)
Curtis: ‘In much the same way as the science of entomology had been changed in the 1950s, now ecology was transformed by the social and political pressures of the early seventies. Ecologists became the moral and spiritual guardians of a new view of the human relationship with nature. And they too cited Darwin’s laws to prove their view was correct.’ The entomologists went with a competitive Darwinism and the ecologists with a co-operative. A faith in science was replaced by a faith in nature.
Ecotopia: ‘an ideal society based on principles designed to minimize the society’s negative impact on the environment’ (The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction).
Episode Five: ‘Black Power’
Kwame Nkrumah:
The first president of independent Ghana (1957–66) and the first popular African leader to achieve independence for his country. Unfortunately the national hero turned into a despotic tyrant, who was deposed by a military coup. (Who’s Who in the Twentieth Century)
The first Prime Minister (1957–60) and subsequently the first President (1960–6) of the West African state of Ghana. Nkrumah gained worldwide prominence both as a proponent of African liberation and as one of the leading advocates of Pan-Africanism. After studies in the United States and in Great Britain, Nkrumah returned to Ghana in 1947 and founded the Convention People’s Party. During the 1950s this movement helped organize several major strikes which pressured the British colonial authorities to grant a greater degree of self‐government in Ghana. After achieving independence in 1957, following a brief period of multi‐party democracy, Nkrumah transformed Ghana into a one‐party state, setting a pattern which would be followed in many other newly independent African states. He also imposed major restrictions on civil liberties at this time. Throughout his political career, Nkrumah was an ardent advocate of the ideology of Pan‐Africanism, helping to found the Organization of African Unity in 1963. In the economic realm, Nkrumah promoted a strategy of rapid industrialization, and the keystone of this was the massive Volta Dam project which dramatically increased Ghana’s electricity production. Ultimately, despite the completion of the Volta Dam, Nkrumah’s attempt to move Ghana into producing heavy industrial goods proved a failure. The Ghanaian economy in these years also lapsed into a period of macroeconomic instability with very high rates of inflation. Due in large part to these economic failures, Nkrumah was overthrown by a military coup in 1966. (A Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics and International Relations)
The hope for the Volta Dam was that it would instigate ‘take-off’,
An idea derived from the American economic historian Walt W. Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth (1953). Rostow postulated five such stages: traditional society; preconditions for take-off; take-off to maturity; drive to maturity; and maturity. In this way he claimed to identify a recognizable stage in a country’s history, lasting perhaps 20–30 years, during which the conditions required for sustained and fairly rapid economic growth are consolidated, and beyond which growth is more or less assured. The theory assumes that levels of capital investment are crucial to initiating economic growth. Rostow applied this schema to the problems of the then developing countries; and (indirectly) influenced and justified American foreign and overseas-aid policies towards the Third World. (A Dictionary of Sociology)
The foreign aid, like American investment in the dam, was intended to get Nkrumah on side with regard to the Cold War. Curtis: ‘Bit by bit, Nkrumah’s utopian vision was slipping away. The Volta scheme had become something very different from what he had originally intended. At every stage, the project had been shaped not by his idealism but by powerful political and economic pressures.’
Episode Six: ‘A is for Atom’
In 1945, scientists were heroes. Many who had worked on the atomic bomb felt guilty about it, and wanted nuclear science to serve humanity.
Returning to Episode One, a mention of Lenin’s statement that ‘Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.’
The British government wanted Britain to get ahead in nuclear power just as it had with the railways in the nineteenth century.
When in 1956 power was switched from the first generator at Calder Hall to the National Grid it was hailed as a great achievement but scant attention was paid to the real purpose of the programme, to breed plutonium for Britain’s nuclear deterrent. (The Oxford Companion to British History)
Seeking lower costs, electrical utilities adopted nuclear reactor technology; Westinghouse opened the first nuclear power plant at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, in 1959. Predictions that electricity would soon be “too cheap to meter” went unfulfilled, however. Nuclear-power plants proved not only expensive to build but difficult to manage and prone to dangerous accidents. The Arab oil embargo of 1973–1974 further increased utilities’ fuel costs, driving up consumer rates. (The Oxford Companion to United States History)
China syndrome:
The (mistaken) idea that the molten core of a nuclear reactor in the USA, caused by a loss-of-cooling accident (LOCA) in a nuclear power plant, would bore through the Earth all the way to China. While the reactor is no longer critical after a LOCA, the heat generated from the decay of the fission products in the fuel rods can cause the core to melt. (A Dictionary of Energy Science)
Three Mile Island:
An island in the Susquehanna River near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, that was the scene of the most serious accident in the history of the American nuclear power industry. At 4 a.m. on 28 March 1979 a valve in the nuclear reactor of the power station here closed in error, blocking the water supply to the main feedwater system and causing the reactor core to shut down. This was an automatic procedure that itself caused no hazard, but a series of equipment and instrument malfunctions, combined with human errors and mistaken decisions, led to a serious loss of water coolant from the reactor core. As a result the core was partially exposed and a quantity of hydrogen gas escaped into the reactor building. Though having negligible health consequences, the incident had profound effects on the American nuclear power industry, resulting in the closure of seven similar reactors and increased public fears about the safety of nuclear reactors in general. Coincidentally, 1979 also witnessed the release of The China Syndrome, a film in which an operational flaw in a nuclear power station is covered up by the authorities. (Brewer’s Dictionary of Modern Phrase and Fable)
The Three Mile Island accident jolted the nuclear-power industry. Utilities shelved plans to build new plants and shut down some already in operation. An antinuclear power movement, already under way, gained momentum. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the federal oversight body, moved aggressively to improve safety in all nuclear plants. The accident also affected research and scholarship. Earlier, engineering studies on reactor safety had typically sought to estimate the likelihood and health impact of specific mishaps. Subsequently, the research explored the interplay of multiple failures and the effect of procedures and training programs on operators’ performance. More than a cataclysm for an industry, the Three Mile Island accident also illuminated larger issues on the technological, social, and ideological horizon. (The Oxford Companion to United States History)
After Three Mile Island (1979) there was Chernobyl (1986).
Curtis ends with a nuclear historian, Joseph Morone: ‘we still have this view that society can’t shape technology […] just as it wasn’t true in 1950, it’s not true today. […] The history of nuclear power is a history of political and economic and social decisions. […] society has to stop sleepwalking […] it’s a moral choice.’