Bibliographic record
Abstract
The consequences of war with the United States were potentially so great that British decision-makers could not afford to dismiss the prospect out of hand. No less a figure than Winston Churchill, the architect of the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’ and, after 1963, an honorary US citizen, could write in 1927 that it was ‘quite right in the interests of peace to go on talking about war with the United States being “unthinkable”. Everyone knows that this is not true.’ 1 The likelihood of war was so remote, however, that the British navy, unlike its American counterpart, did not prepare formal plans for such a contingency at any time during the first half of the twentieth century. Asquith’s Liberal government had ruled in 1909 that the Admiralty should not treat the USN as a potential opponent; and Lloyd George’s Cabinet reaffirmed the ruling in August 1919 to prevent the Admiralty from using US naval construction to justify a large building program of its own. These concerns were justified: at the end of the First World War, the USN was in fact beginning to play a prominent role in the Admiralty’s calculations. Official memoranda on future naval requirements prepared following the Armistice contained explicit references to the possibility of an Anglo-American war 2 and, in June 1919, the Plans Division recommended that an officer be assigned to draw up plans for one. 3
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.002 |
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".