Proliferation before Hiroshima: tracing the wartime diffusion of nuclear knowledge
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Relatively simplistic conceptions of early nuclear history can sometimes prevail even among nonproliferation scholars. The dominance of the nation-state in historic and contemporary conceptions of nuclear-weapons development carries with it a temptation to treat nuclear-weapons acquisition as essentially linear: first one state and then another, with the United States as the point of origin for all weapons-relevant nuclear knowledge and 1945 as the effective year of proliferation studies’ birth. This article argues against such a view. It draws on a wide range of archival material to illustrate the surprisingly wide diffusion of nuclear knowledge prior to the bombing of Hiroshima, highlighting, first, the reciprocal nature of the early Anglo-American nuclear relationship, including the extent to which the United States benefited from external information; second, how connections within the British Empire enabled the participation of personnel from Australia and New Zealand in various aspects of British and American nuclear work during the war; and, third, the privileged access of French personnel to British and Canadian nuclear knowledge. The overall argument is that the early history of nuclear proliferation is more complex than is generally thought and that greater acknowledgment of these complexities may have contemporary value.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".