The Incomplete Shield: The Distant Early Warning Line and the Struggle for Effective Continental Air Defense, 1950-1960
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Distant Early Warning Line was a chain of radar stations built by the United States along the north shore of North America. The DEW Line was the result of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's 1952 Lincoln Laboratory Summer Study Group, which first conceived of the DEW Line as a radar detection and tracking system designed to help protect the United States and Canada from attack by Soviet bomber aircraft. Considered a technological feat at the time it was completed in 1957, the DEW Line implemented many new radar, signal processing and communications technologies. However, the DEW Line as constructed differed substantially for the original proposal, limiting the effectiveness of its air defense function. After 1957, tests of the system raised doubts about its effectiveness. As the missile age dawned and bombers faded as the primary Soviet threat, the DEW Line became only one of several systems designed to detect a Soviet nuclear attack against North America.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".