Proliferation before Hiroshima: tracing the wartime diffusion of nuclear knowledge
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
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.
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 | 0.006 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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