‘Some residue of prejudice against atomic power’: Oscar Newman’s underground city and peaceful nuclear explosions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Beginning in 1957, the United States Government pursued an unimaginable enterprise. For eighteen years, and as part of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s ‘Atoms for Peace’ initiative, the controversial Project Plowshare employed hundreds of scientists, engineers, and policymakers, and facilitated 27 tests and 31 nuclear detonations for an outrageous goal: the use of nuclear weapons for constructive means. The experiments were designed to explore a range of energy-related and infrastructural projects such as gas and isotope extraction or excavations for the purposes of constructing new harbours, canals, and transportation ways. This article examines a speculative architectural project inspired directly by Project Plowshare: a proposal for an underground city to be built beneath Manhattan in a spherical cavity created by a nuclear bomb, suggested by the Canadian architect and planner Oscar Newman (1935–2004), and published in Esquire magazine in 1969. Rather than examining this project for its architectural qualities or plausibility, this article explores Newman’s underground city as a document that testifies to the conditions of its making and situates it as a concise, literal, and radical representation of the conditions under which architecture was imagined in the Cold War decades in the United States. In Newman’s underground city, architecture is embedded within a constellation of geopolitics, warfare, and propaganda, and makes visible the inherent dependability between technological progress, construction and development, and environmental destruction.
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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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.018 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| 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".