Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the 1930s, British scientists perfected a sugar-white explosive called RDX. Twice as deadly as TNT, RDX was also ten times more expensive. In The Secret History of RDX, historian Colin F. Baxter tells the story of the people who developed, produced, and used RDX in the top-secret, $100 million factory near Kingsport, Tennessee, called the Holston Ordinance Works. Drawing from archival records and numerous interviews with individuals who worked at the “powder plant” from 1942 to 1945, he explores not only the explosive’s military significance but also its impact on the lives of ordinary Americans involved in the war industry. Behind thirty-eight miles of fences, thousands of local men and women synthesized twenty-three thousand tons of RDX each month, enough to supply the entire Allied army, air force, and navy. RDX was added to torpedo warheads, airborne antisubmarine depth charges, and a mounted antisubmarine weapon called the Hedgehog. For the first time, the Allies had a weapon that could challenge German U-boats in the Atlantic, and RDX became the workhorse explosive for the Allies throughout the war. Baxter details the work of Canadian, British, and American scientists as well as the Eastman Company executives who raced to produce the explosive effectively and quickly. He examines the debates between RDX advocates and their opponents in the Army Ordnance Department, as well as the use of the explosive in the bomber war over Germany, naval war in the Atlantic, and as a key element in the trigger device of the atomic bomb.
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 | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.037 | 0.009 |
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".