The Rocketsâ Red Glare: The impact of technology on U.S. nuclear strategy from Eisenhower to Carter
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Manhattan Project redefined the landscape of international security. The advent of the nuclear age, in many ways, reshaped the prospect of great power politics and the very nature of war itself. While nuclear weapons have altered the security environment, the literature that revolves around the subject is limited to a few select topics: arms control, deterrence, normative assertions on the (im)morality of nuclear weapons, the routines and potential accidents of organizational behaviour, and the boondoggles of ballistic missile defense. The literature fails to address how the technical operating requirements of nuclear weapons affect nuclear strategy. \n \nThe research question posed in this thesis is: does technology play an independent role in determining nuclear doctrine? The explanation tested in this thesis is that technology, specifically the technical operating requirements of nuclear weapons drove the American military towards a counterforce-biased doctrine and away from a city-strike strategy. Furthermore, the technical operating requirements were responsible for the move away from Launch on Warning and First Strike doctrines. Technology, as the primary driving factor in the establishment of nuclear doctrine, analysts should be able to make key insights into the highly classified characteristics of a state’s nuclear strategy if they are able to find out the procurement policy of that state’s military. A technology-driven nuclear doctrine warns us about how other states will develop in the future, as they will be reflective of the technical operating characteristics of their assets.
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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".