In October 1945, George Orwell responded to a letter from Mr J. Stewart Cook in the leftwing weekly newspaper Tribune calling for more science education.
The call can hardly have come as a surprise. War had brought science and engineering to the fore – from the Spitfire fighter plane and radar to Bletchley Park’s codebreakers – and now that war was over, many thought it was time to build a brave new world. Science had won the war; the view was that it should build the peace.
Only the week before, in the same newspaper, Orwell had warned of the dangers posed by the atomic bomb. He was not a pacifist – far from it. But he started off by saying how likely it was that the world would “be blown to pieces by it within the next five years”, and ended with a stark warning against big science.
