- 1 The Gulf War Jigsaw
- 2 Magic Bullet
- 3 Star Gazers
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Horizon explores American plans to launch a space observatory to map the universe and learn how stars are created.
Air Date: 1965-02-03
- 4 Mir Mortals
- 5 The Curse of Vesuvius
- 6 Overkill
- 7 The Limits To Birth
- 8 Hopeful Monsters
- 9 The Rainmaker
- 10 Dr Miller And The Islanders
- 11 Saddam's Secrets
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After the 1991 Gulf War, a UN Special Commission was set up to go into war-torn Iraq, seek out Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and destroy or disable them. This remarkable Horizon follows the tension of the inspectors' every move as they track down secret military bases, Scud missile launchers, the infamous supergun barrels, decaying chemical weapons dumps, and the remains of the nuclear research establishment, cunningly hidden amongst debris and the innocent-looking rubble of post-war reconstruction. At each stage in the cat-and-mouse game with the Iraqi security forces, the UN team had to draw on cunning and courage to force their way into secret locations. Day by day, they recorded their progress on video, and charted the tensions of diplomatic stand-offs as the world was twice drawn close to another violent confrontation in the Gulf. The courage of the UN team, drawn from scientists from all over the world, is graphically revealed as they attempt to gauge the lethal nature of rusting canisters of poison gas, at Saddam's decaying chemical weapons store. After the immediate rush of successes, the inspectors' work became a steady process of attrition - grinding on against the stonewalling of their hosts. "The weapons programme is like layers of an onion. Every now and then, Saddam would allow us to peel one back, but there is always more underneath." But five years on, the inspectors had still not tracked down proof of the darkest of Saddam's secrets: his biological weapons programme. However, painstaking detective work revealed that huge quantities of the media needed for growing biological organisms had been imported, and Iraq finally admitted to having substantial biological weapons, which are cheaper and more simple to produce than nuclear and chemical weapons, yet have the same destructive power. Gradually the inspectors got close to the labs and animal testing stations where the lethal toxins had been produced. In addition to the most common biological warfare organisms, anthrax and botulinum, Iraq developed and tested strains of viruses never before adopted for weapons purposes. This was part of an ongoing international biological arms race to design novel weapons using gene-splicing or filoviruses such as Ebola, Hanta fever and others.
Air Date: 1998-02-19
- 12 Antarctica Special
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The Ice Lives, The Ice Forms, The Ice Melts
- 13 Dawn Of The Clone Age
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Air Date: 1997-10-23
- 14 The Man Who Lost His Body
- 15 The Virus That Cures
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Air Date: 1997-10-09
- 16 Fermat's Last Theorem
- 17 Out Of Asia
- 18 Mind Over Body
- 19 Crater Of Death
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This is the profile of an extraterrestrial mass murderer: one whose existence was denied by scientific orthodoxy for nearly two decades, but has now been tracked down. 65 million years ago a 15km wide asteroid hit the Earth. In 1978 Walter Alvarez, a Nobel-prize-winning physicist, and his son Luis, first proposed the outrageous idea that a meteorite strike blasted the dinosaurs into extinction, taking with them half of life on the planet. Their theory was hotly disputed. Now the irrefutable evidence is rolling in. Martin Belderson's dramatic film retraces the hunt for evidence for the hidden 'smoking cannon': the crater left by the impact 65 million years ago. In 1991 it was found, buried beneath the coastline of the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. The central crater is at least 180km wide and nearly 20km deep. The outer impact rings may stretch to 300km in diameter, making it the largest crater produced in the inner solar system in the last four billion years. But did it cause extinction? The fossil record seemed to show a gradual decline and extinction of animals like the dinosaur before the line of the impact. The in-fighting forced many scientists to re-examine their fossil beds. What they discovered has overturned the orthodoxy and led to a new understanding of how extinction works, and why some species survived whilst others vanished. Alvarez, father and son, have finally been vindicated. Horizon reaches back in time and reconstructs how, in a brief moment, the fate of millions of species was sealed: from the new-found fossil 'horizon of death', to scientists modelling the blast itself; a million times stronger than the world's combined nuclear arsenals. Startling graphics reveal how in 30 seconds North America was scoured by a fireball. Within an hour the world was aflame. And new evidence shows that the asteroid chanced on the worst possible site on Earth to strike. It hit unique sulphate-rich rocks, vaporised them, and kicked billions of tons of sulphuric acid into the atmosphere. The blast fashioned a dense, dust-shrouded sulphurous atmosphere which led to darkness for six months. Global temperatures stayed near freezing for a year. The shock-heating of the impact created clouds of nitric acid that fell as rain. The top 100m of the oceans became stagnant acid, dissolving the shells of sea creatures, including plankton: the base of the food chain. And the culprit? An object 15km across was needed to do the damage. That meant, not an asteroid, but a comet. There is evidence that 65 million years ago, there was a shower of comets closing on the Earth. What's more, comet showers are cyclical, returning to threaten the planet at long intervals. Such repeating showers may thus explain many of the other mass extinctions of life on Earth. The hunt is on for more craters.
Air Date: 1997-12-06