The curious tale of the dog that did not bark: Explaining Canada’s non-acquisition of an independent nuclear arsenal, 1945–1957
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada’s non-acquisition of nuclear weapons in the immediate postwar period represents an important puzzle. Acquisition of an independent nuclear arsenal presented Canada with an unprecedented opportunity to ameliorate its objective insecurity vis-à-vis US power. Many theories suggest that when combined with Canada’s postwar capabilities, this insecurity ought to have pushed Canada toward acquisition. I argue that Canada’s non-acquisition of nuclear weapons can only be accounted for by an explanation that recognizes the importance of trust. To do so, I develop a conceptual framework for understanding trust in international politics. Drawing on research from psychology, economics, and even neurology, I develop a model that shows how narratives like liberalism can render trusting behaviour reasonable for agents, and how five mechanisms can generate the conditions required for trust to obtain. By applying this model to the Canada–US relationship I provide an explanation for Canada’s non-acquisition that is superior to existing accounts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".