The closest brush: How a UN secretary-general averted doomsday
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AbstractA half-century after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the world still overlooks the role played by U Thant—the quiet, unassuming UN secretary-general from Burma—in helping the superpowers resolve their crisis and avert nuclear war. Thant sent early and important messages to President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. The first requested a moratorium on the conflict at sea. Although many of Kennedy's advisers looked upon Thant's initiative with derision, Kennedy asked Thant to send another message requesting a cessation of Soviet shipping. The message gave Khrushchev a way to stop his ships but still save face. This ended the threat of a naval confrontation and enabled the superpowers to focus on the deeper issues of the conflict. Early on, Thant also proposed and pushed the idea that eventually formed the basis of agreement: Soviet missile withdrawal in exchange for guarantees of Cuban security. During moments in the crisis when many were calling for an attack on Cuba, Kennedy and Secretary of State Dean Rusk cited Thant's initiatives as reasons for restraint. Thant also shuttled to Cuba to mollify Prime Minister Fidel Castro and to confirm that missile dismantlement had begun. He then aided the negotiations between Soviet and American teams at the United Nations to resolve remaining issues, such as how the missile withdrawal was to be verified.KeywordsCuban Missile CrisisKennedyKhrushchevnuclear warU ThantUnited Nations FundingThis research received funding from United Nations Studies at Yale University, and the authors thank Jim Sutterlin and Bruce Russett for their support in the initiation of this research. The authors also received research funds from the Canadian Aerospace Warfare Centre, which is gratefully acknowledged.Additional informationAuthor biographiesA. Walter Dorn is a professor of defence studies at the Royal Military College of Canada and chair of the department of security and international affairs at the Canadian Forces College.Robert Pauk is a retired Canadian military officer who served in UN peacekeeping operations.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".