“Informal Information”: A Cultural History of NORAD’s Creation, 1944-1957
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union emerged during the late 1940s, one of the primary security concerns for Canada and the United States was the perceived danger posed by Soviet long-range bombers armed with atomic weapons. This apprehension intensified in 1950 following the start of the Korean War. Throughout the 1950s, air defence officers from the United States Air Force and Royal Canadian Air Force worked together to build an air defence system capable of mitigating the risk that Soviet bombers might attack strategic targets in North America. These likeminded officers worked formally and informally to construct a system based on their shared assumptions about the best way to mutually protect their countries. In creating the North American air defence system, these officers developed not only professional relationships but also personal relationships, friendships, that buttressed their trust in each other. Political scientist Joel Sokolsky argues that officers in these situations develop a “fraternity of the uniform.” This trust continued throughout the 1950s and was solidified in September 1957 when the Canadian and American governments agreed to create the North American Air Defence Command (NORAD). This dissertation examines how Canadian and American air force officers created a unique, bilateral military culture, the North American air defence culture, in the late 1940s and the 1950s. It was fully formed by 1957 and became central to NORAD’s organizational culture when Canada and the United States formed the command in 1957. This dissertation argues that formal and informal collaboration between Canadian and American air force officers was central to the development of personal and professional relationships that influenced the 1957 creation of NORAD and its resultant, unique military culture.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".