‘Some residue of prejudice against atomic power’: Oscar Newman’s underground city and peaceful nuclear explosions
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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.
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.
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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it