A thing that really strikes me as extraordinary is how there used to be two almost entirely independent technological supply chains. Americans and soviets both built extremely advanced equipment, with radar and sonar and computers and all that and literally from "digging ore out of the mountain" to making a computer there was almost no overlap in supply chain.
The titanium for the SR-71, all came from Russia, which the US acquired by mounting lots of shell companies across the world. When there is overlap between supply chains of countries at war, I have to say I find it quite comical. https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/21105/how-was-ti...
It is similar to the legend that says the Germans supplied the red ink for the bright army pants of French soldiers on the field in 1914 « for a good price » (you bet!), although I think this one is rather a legend, as it is true that French costumes were too fancy for war, I think the traditional red pants were not in widespread application at the time.
The French were aware that their traditional (mid-19th century) red trousers were not appropriate for modern warfare. Unfortunately, getting them replaced was not an easy task due to political difficulties.
This article (in French) is a good summary of the French army's efforts from 1903 to find a uniform more suited to modern warfare:
http://rosalielebel75.franceserv.com/reforme-uniforme.html
It does mention the importing of red dye from Germany, in the context of the planned future uniform being a patriotic mix of red, white and blue, and the red being omitted due to the supply being curtailed.
You're thinking of the US Springfield 1903. It used a Mauser style bolt-action that was protected by a patent. Mausesr sued and won. The US gov had to pay license fees for it. I think actual payment was delayed until after the war was over.
It went far father than firearms, later - in WWII you had a shared military-industrial-complex supplying both sides, with entities like GM and Ford supplying huge quantities of armaments to both sides - Ford went so far as to enslave most of the population of Rostov-na-Donu.
I wonder if at some point there will be unified suppliers and supply chains for all armaments for all actors, acting entirely independently of any nation state. Corporations are more or less there in terms of their ability to hop jurisdictions and work around international law.
In fact, maybe we do already have this, but it’s non-obvious.
It's worth remembering that international subsidiaries inside Germany were entirely cut off from their parent companies. There were no executives from the parent corporation present in Germany, all the other employees were Germans, no money could be transferred out of Germany, and after a while they even had to get special permission to send telegrams in or out. They still called themselves Ford Germany or IBM Germany or whatever, but the reality is that this was just a name that they used; there were no real ties of ownership or control left. Naturally when France fell, the French subsidies suffered the same fate, or even worse.
ITT was another conglomerate that got fat selling to both the Allies and the Axis; radar sets made by ITT subsidiary Federal Telephone and Radio were used to shoot down planes built by ITT subsidiary Focke-Wulf (partially owned by radio manufacturer and ITT subsidiary Lorenz).
Well it's unlikely that has complete control over the supply chain and so it's corporations doing business with each other. They'll find a rapidly decreasing number of people willing to do business if they ride roughshod over others IP.
One interesting supply chain is the EF50 vacuum tube, which was manufactured in Holland and was vital for radar in World War II. Hours before the Germans took over Holland, the British trucked out 25,000 tubes and key manufacturing equipment so they could start manufacturing the tubes in England.
Not only were the supply chains different but the US and USSR also had very different design and procurement philosophies that tied back to military doctrine. There's an interesting summary on Reddit related to Soviet aviation that outlines some of the differences. [1]
This seems to be an example of defense strategy driving economics. In the US we tend to think of market forces driving defense policy but in fact there's a feedback loop between defense technology and how societies organize themselves.
In the video I have linked below, in third lecture Jonathan Parshall compares industrial doctrines of tank manufacturing by Nazi Germamy, Soviet Union and USA during WW2. Very enlightening.
Three different systems, three different manufacturing philosophies.
- Germany - pre-industrial artisan manufacture (250 modifications during 2-year production run of 1347 units, 300 thousand man-hours per tank vs American 10 thousand man-hours)
- USA - Detroit style horizontal mass production (US scaled down tanks production in 1944 due to overproduction in 1943)
- Soviet Union - cost-optimized, vertical mass production (the average tank lasted only 14 hours in battle anyway)
It looks exactly like the Dialog (manufactured by Ericsson, or probably L. M. Ericsson at the time) that were ubiquitous in Sweden in the 70s and 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ericsson_Dialog .
My grandmother (92) still uses an identical rotary phone here in Italy, in late 2020. It works, she’s comfortable with it. To be pedantic, however, it isn’t made of Bakelite... it’s not that brittle. It’s some other kind of (archaic, by now) plastic with plenty of bromide fire inhibitors because it’s turning darker by the month. I’m told it was originally an off-white; now it’s a very rich beige.
It's fascinating to see the difference in consumer goods. Soviet Union seemed to build things to last forever, vs. the planned obsolescence for American stuff (although this is really only true after the outsourcing began).
Things in Soviet Union lasted forever not because they were purposely built that way, but because you either fix things or don't have them - it was almost impossible to get a new replacements. For example you would need to wait more than 10 years in a queue to get new car. Very few domestic made things were considered more desirable than foreign, and usually reliability was terrible.
Old cars after the war were terrible and only lasted for short distances, no matter if they were from the east bloc or west. But longevity rapidly improved in western cars, while eastern ones didn't really develop that much. Early Japanese cars were also bad but got better. Soviet and eastern block technology just developed much more slowly than western Europe or Japan, and the difference grew larger every year.
Things that happened in cars in the eighties:
electronic ignition (no distributor), fuel injection (no carburetor), full body zinc coating (much less rust).
I find this also quite fascinating as well considering that this was a non market economy. While not a complete refutation, I think the technological success of the USSR pokes holes in the economic calculation arguments of Von Mises (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Calculation_in_the_So...).
Mises doesn’t say that they can’t produce things of value or innovate technologically. Mises says that what they produce is not going to be what consumers want as much as things they would have chosen themselves, and more importantly that price controls prevent the signaling that allows them to correctly allocate capital. The eventual collapse of the USSR is the evidence for this.
The eventual collapse of the soviet union is attributable to dozens of causes, including an oppressive government which lost the support and confidence of it's people, a military budget in excess of 30% of GDP, an expensive and pointless foreign war, widespread censorship, and a crippling bureaucracy.
I'd be skeptical that price controls had a larger affect on the distribution of information than censorship and the threat of imprisonment in the gulag.
> oppressive government which lost the support and confidence of it's people
The oppression was in order to control the economy and the support and confidence was lost because in part because of their inability to provide basic goods and services in a command economy.
> I'd be skeptical that price controls had a larger affect on the distribution of information than censorship and the threat of imprisonment in the gulag.
Its not about the size of the effect but about the effect on specific information that is needed for capital allocation.
USSR was outcompeted by market-driven economies and collapsed due to the unsustainability of the system.
Uhm, no. No single factor, but the USA going into an arms race with the USSR combined with the USA in association with Saudia Arabia tanking world oil prices played significant roles in the demise of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc.
Ok, why was the mixed economy of the US able to produce all those weapons and all those consumer goods and feed and clothe their people while the command economy of the USSR couldn't compete on any one of those fronts?
Oil prices is a distraction from the issue because if the USSR had been able to sell petroleum at a premium then they would have been able to purchase raw materials and finished products from market economies elsewhere and perhaps sustained the system for longer but it doesn't explain why they were reliant on an extraction industry and market-produced goods.
I think you're looking at this from a consumerism point of view.
The US started a huge build up of arms. eg missiles and destroyers specifically, but also the US had significant advances with tank and aircraft weaponry.
The US consumerist system had a positive feedback into the US industrial military complex where advances in manufacturing and information technology lead to huge efficiency gains for arms production even though Western arms production supply chains almost completely isolated.
So, the US had a massive technology and manufacturing advantage, then the US tanked world oil prices and other commodities that the USSR required from world markets. Significantly the USSR was buying more grain and food from the world market, so while the USSR was able to keep up with technology, it was not able to keep up with efficiency gains that the US was realising.
Corruption was also a huge problem for the USSR, and it still is to this day in Russia.
The Americans bankrupted the USSR on multiple fronts. Capital allocation is a capitalist system notion, but, more generally, the US was able to allocate deploy its available resources in a way that out-competed the USSR. The USA was able to organise its society and economy in a more efficient and productive way than the USSR, and that is a Macro Economic argument.
Until the 80's the USA had second most equitable distribution of wealth next to the USSR. The USA imposed significant taxes on everybody up to a marginal rate of 80%. If you want to "Make America Great Again", you need to restore taxation to the levels seen between 1945 and 1981; maybe even to the end of the 80's. American government funding through the DARPA project lead to numerous technological advances that most people, worldwide, now depend upon.
> I think you're looking at this from a consumerism point of view.
Not really, more like a “capitalist” p.o.v. but not in the pejorative context or the crony corporatist context that it holds today; my view is that prices are the mechanism by which information is shared by all participants in a market and that profit (from uncoerced transactions) is the wage for correctly allocating capital. This process occurs regardless of state intervention but it is distorted by state intervention, which is why authoritarians seek to mandate that profit be taken from people in order to fund their failing projects. Left unchecked this process strangles the productive machinery of society because the unproductive coercively funded portion captures more and more of the value in society and continues to squander it on their own values that are not viable in a free and open society. If this process is restrained then the market can drive growth and the parasitic aspect grows with it because of the continued increase in surplus value generated by the market and the fact that the parasitic coercive aspect can simply claim more of the surplus value.
You mention advantages that the US had but that doesn’t explain why the USSR collapsed. Lots of places besides the US didn’t have all of those same advantages but they didn’t descend into the same type of failures that command economies did. And its not as though the USSR didn’t innovate technologically. They were just had less surplus value available to their parasitic endeavors because they had a command economy and that system is not able to coordinate the actions of millions of people to the degree that a market is.
> Corruption was also a huge problem for the USSR, and it still is to this day in Russia.
There may or may not be a cultural element to this but surely you agree that corruption is more of a problem when the corrupt entity has more power and control?
> The Americans bankrupted the USSR on multiple fronts. Capital allocation is a capitalist system notion, but, more generally, the US was able to allocate deploy its available resources in a way that out-competed the USSR. The USA was able to organise its society and economy in a more efficient and productive way than the USSR, and that is a Macro Economic argument.
Capitalists may have studied the way that markets allocate capital in more detail but the entire concept of communism is that the workers “should” control the capital assets they use at their profession. If it is true that they haven’t even considered how workers would choose what capital assets to build and maintain, which capital assets to leave idle for the time being, and which capital assets to abandon, disassemble, and reallocate, then that is an argument in my favor.
> Until the 80's the USA had second most equitable distribution of wealth next to the USSR. The USA imposed significant taxes on everybody up to a marginal rate of 80%. If you want to "Make America Great Again", you need to restore taxation to the levels seen between 1945 and 1981; maybe even to the end of the 80's. American government funding through the DARPA project lead to numerous technological advances that most people, worldwide, now depend upon.
This is an ideological issue and beyond the scope of our discussion about prices, command economies, and capital assets.
> I'd be skeptical that price controls had a larger affect on the distribution of information
I don’t think you’re understanding what information is being talked about here. If you don’t let a market of buyers and sellers determine the price of something you can’t discover the supply and demand curves nor the price floor, etc.
If the government comes out and just dictates that the price for gas is capped at $2/gal, you just end up with a bunch of shortages, rations, and lost potential oil industries because a ton of market information has bene destroyed. That is entirely independent of censorship.
How are you able to draw this distinction? If price controls are ineffective allocation of capital then surely GDP was depressed? How can you isolate and ignore price controls in such a complex system as the Soviet economy?
I wouldn't ignore them, but I'd suggest that there were other more potent mechanisms for information control which resulted in ineffective capital allocation.
Consider that talking about a superior suspension system present in Western cars would have been problematic to the censors. Engineers who pushed such systems could find themselves in trouble, and ultimately cozy insiders could get competitors blackballed for pushing competing programs e.g. Censorship and Corruption did the most damage to the efficient allocation of capital.
The corruption of nominating a supplier or a design as the only approved design is equivalent to not using price as information - or rather, not being allowed to use price as information.
For example, if a supplier is inefficient in a free market, then the prices they charge are significantly higher than the inputs - i.e. profit is high. High profits attract competition; competitors look at the price of the output and the prices of the input and see that they can do better by building something cheaper. This competition drives efficiency and reduces prices.
Whether competition is banned, or improvements are banned, or prices are exogenously set, it's all approximately equivalent to mucking with price as information.
Certainly the USSR made other mistakes besides price controls, the point is that without market-generated prices, they had no way of knowing which goods were in higher demand relative to their supply in order to invest capital resources in producing those. Many Soviet goods were of high quality but the planners still sought pricing information from their western rivals in order to allocate capital.
the most important immediate causes were a) that it could not feed itself and had to buy food imports with hard currency, and b) that it acquired its hard currency by selling oil, which became unsustainable during the 1980s
Often omitted part of the reason for that was that it had to build itself up, in rather hostile conditions, from much worse state than "the west". Even former Russian partition of Poland, to this day considered (for a reason) a backwards place, was one of the most modern areas of the Russian Empire.
Then when post-WW2 the expected disarmament didn't come... well
There were many problems with the Soviet system but the collapse was not really related to it not being a market economy. In fact the enormous economic collapse that happened was due to privatization shock doctrine promoted by free market fundamentalists. Ironically free market reforms killed Russia not their command economy.
Thats an interesting perspective. Why don’t you agree that the privatization was a reaction to a failing system? Surely if command economics had been successful they wouldn’t have felt the need to privatize?
The people who pushed privatization were the ones who personally benefited the most from it. It went from semi-incompetent central command to completely incompetent private cronies with baked in government support in the form of contracts, outright thuggery, and geopolitical might. Sure they got cleaner pricing signals, but they lost everything that made them competitive. At this point, most of the privatized industry that remains is largely rent seeking (telecom et all), resource extraction, and the military industrial complex.
The argument is that what the USSR experienced is an accelerated version of what we're seeing in the US, since it didn't have the other social institutions to make the transition. The free market didn't win, it just paused its ambitions to cannibalize the only competition before continuing on the same destructive path that the USSR economy speed ran in the 80s.
> semi-incompetent central command to completely incompetent private cronies with baked in government support in the form of contracts, outright thuggery, and geopolitical might.
this doesn't exactly make sense when the people you call semi-incompetent were unable to meet basic standards of the modern world with their dictatorial powers and the crony economy that replaced them was able to rebuild the capital assets and replace them.
> they lost everything that made them competitive.
they were not competitive at the time according to practically everyone.
> most of the privatized industry that remains is largely rent seeking (telecom et all), resource extraction, and the military industrial complex.
why was a command economy unable to make extractive and rent-seeking enterprises work? why was a market economy able to sustain a military industrial complex (which is wholly parasitical) when a command economy was not?
> The argument is that what the USSR experienced is an accelerated version of what we're seeing in the US,
this is because the US is a mixed economy, not a market economy. the same process of parasitic institutions strangling the productive institutions is at play, it only takes longer because there are more productive institutions and fewer parasitic institutions in a mixed system than a command system.
> The free market didn't win, it just paused its ambitions to cannibalize the only competition before continuing on the same destructive path that the USSR economy speed ran in the 80s.
of course the free market didn't win because there was no free market competing. the mixed economy outcompeted the command economy because the market portion produced more value and the command economy choked on its own inability to effectively allocate capital. It is true that people who had the money came from market institutions and purchased formerly public assets in the former USSR. This suggests the question: Why were they able to purchase these assets and why didn't representatives of the command economy purchase the (private) capital assets in the west?
I'm far from an expert on this, but the reason could be that back then, "democracy" and free market without State intervention were presented as inseparable parts of the same package.
That just moves the question to why people would want a democracy if they had a state controlled economy that provided for their needs and prevented them from capitalist exploitation?
The point here is that soviet economic collapse as a historical event preceded the shock privatization* despite what command economy apologists might claim.
*free market proponents shouldn’t defend the sale of state assets to oligarchs when those assets were formerly expropriated. The title is encumbered by the previous misdeeds.
There is no dispute that the Soviet state-driven economy was totally inadequate in providing for the needs of its people and that led to its collapse.
I think there is also no dispute that the wave of privatizations that followed the end of USSR led to an even economically worse situation for the Russian state. The fact that said privatizations were merely a transfer of State assets to a small group of private individuals for pennies on the dollar is a signifiant factor of that.
What's less clear to me is why privatization was the chosen direction instead of a more dirigist approach, and I posit that the reason is the prevailing dogma back then (as promoted by such institutions as the IMF or the World Bank) was that democracy equals free market economy equals prosperity, so the Soviet people naturally believed democracy would be the solution to their economic problems. Had they been aware of an alternative way to prosperity (aka the Chinese way), I don't know if they would have adopted democracy (or what passed for democracy in Eltsine and Putin's Russia) or free market economy.
> I think there is also no dispute that the wave of privatizations that followed the end of USSR led to an even economically worse situation for the Russian state. The fact that said privatizations were merely a transfer of State assets to a small group of private individuals for pennies on the dollar is a signifiant factor of that.
I'm not sure how to parse this. Certainly I can agree that there is something morally wrong about the process of expropriating assets, mismanaging them, and then transferring them to politically connected people. However the economy now meets the needs of the people better than it did when it was state-owned, and the Russian state is made of people, it has no interests apart from the people who constitute it. If you're presenting a command economy that can't feed its people and a crony economy that does a better job feeding people, I think most people would choose the option where they get fed.
> What's less clear to me is why privatization was the chosen direction instead of a more dirigist approach, and I posit that the reason is the prevailing dogma back then (as promoted by such institutions as the IMF or the World Bank) was that democracy equals free market economy equals prosperity, so the Soviet people naturally believed democracy would be the solution to their economic problems.
I doubt the people had much say in the matter either way.
privatization shock doctrine occurred during the 1990s, after the collapse. the collapse occurred during a period of market and social liberalization, but was directly precipitated by an oil crash pushing over a deeply sclerotic economy that could not feed itself and a regime with severely diminished legitimacy
Free market fundamentalists? You should probably call it klepto privatization. Most of the resources were appropriated and sold by unscrupulous individuals in positions of power for their own profit. This is how oligarchs were born. There's always a shock when transitioning from a state centrally planned economy to a free market economy but special interests made it far worse.
Hah, I beg to differ here. I mean, a lot of people hated it, but, a lot of people did not. It is scary how well people bought the propaganda. Even now, in ex communist countries, we have people pining for the "good old days".
I can't agree with that or let it pass. The fundamental reason it failed was because there was no checks and balances which are inherent in a true free market system (or reasonably close ones like western economies). Autocratic Communism requires actual morals and concerns for the people at large by the "Party" and not just for their own advancement. While some of that may have existed in the early idealistic USSR, it certainly no longer existed by the 1980s, all that remained was an Autocratic government. It was a complete failure and was living on borrowed time. Autocratic Party Capitalist systems like the Chinese system can work because they generally leave the markets alone at the low to mid levels and attempt to weed out the worst corruption in the upper layers while they take the cream off the top of the economy, the market mostly takes care of itself with pricing, supply and demand as well as incentives. Similarly with Western style government economic systems but citizens actually also have personal freedom as well as economic freedom.
A very large amount of eastern "high tech" lagged behind by a couple of years, because stealing and reverse-engineering the Western designs in order to copy them took about that long.
Less so for military equipment. They definitely didn't copy their titanium submarines (which when US intelligence discovered them, the Navy believed to be a false report because they didn't think it would be possible to fabricate).
Grid fins weren't copied western tech, either. Nor was Sputnik.
Buran is much less of a copy than it looks like. It's superficially similar as it has the same mission profile, which was basically because Soviet officials wanted to be able to keep up with whatever nefarious things the Americans might be doing in orbit with such a thing, even if they weren't sure what that would be. But it's far from being a copy in terms of technology, materials, construction, or even major things like the booster.
Agreed. If anything, the technologically interesting parts compare better to the titanium submarine example, as the RD-170 engine that powered the Energia rocket that lifted the Buran was at least in some ways more sophisticated than anything Americans had at the time, and in particular, used an oxygen-rich staged combustion fuel cycle that American engineers had considered but dismissed as being impossible. Aerojet engineers didn't actually believe the Russians had even built such an engine until they were able to examine one in person after the end of the Cold War.
One thing is that laws of physics don't have nationality nor borders.
Another is that the engineers designing Buran were told to "make it look like US Shuttle" - only look, mind you, as outside of common shape the design is completely different.
One of the reasons I've seen for this order was to make a point to USA, though I do not remember the details. MiG designers were reportedly annoyed at the requirement, but still made it look like Shuttle - and be several times more capable than Shuttle.
Did you only look at the pictures? One is made to be piloted by astronauts and the other is made from the bottom up to be remote controlled but with the option to pilot it manually. The USSR were lightyears ahead in remote control and robotics in space.
Not only that - it was simpler, probably easier to refurbish after flight and had, IIRC, twice the payload capacity (because it didn't need to carry the ascent engines along for the ride).
It wasn't as reusable as the American counterpart, but if we did that with today's reusable boosters the way SpaceX does it, it wouldn't be that bad.
Remember, of course, what drove both designs was the capability to bring large objects back from space in a single orbit
It's really no surprise Buran was abandoned and the shuttle was bad at everything else (except looking good in pictures).
It got to be a lot more than a couple of years as time went on and some things - like high precision manufacturing typical in the West is something they never quite pulled off at scale. Dual use (i.e. designing and making things/capacity so that could be repurposed for military use) was a core part of economic policy with predictable results.
Indeed. They had extensive surveillance and sabotage networks all throughout the world. Simple because it was easier (and cheaper) to just steal it than develop it domestically. With the soviet demise, that apparatus hasn't gone away. Russians and Chinese still work off that approach.
I believe everyone is playing the game of industrial espionage in the realm of defence, it's all 'fair game'. It's just that you have to have something worth stealing in order for it to be stolen. Surely 'The West' is analyzing and borrowing every possible concept they can.
The thing is, Westerners will have a different view of what 'Public v. Private' means, and 'Open Enterprise' is something completely distinct from 'Government' which is not the case in other parts of the world - hence a lot of ideological confusion.
It's hard to get ahead by stealing, because you end up under investing in domestic research capability. China probably has a large enough economy to do both theft and cutting-edge research, but the old USSR would never have pulled ahead.
Dropping support for domestic research&development and switching towards "just steal it" are considered part of why USSR failed - and a legacy of Brezhnev era.
Russian here. Unfortunately, our technological success was mostly limited to military production. And even there, quite a lot of technological processes and templates were simply stolen by our spies (starting from our nuclear weapons program). Granted, Americans used to do that too... USSR used to have a lot of independent discoveries and inventions. But nearly all of them were targeted to the military; Soviet cars, television sets, washing machines etc. were all truly awful.
I think it's still impressive. In 1917, Russia was one of the most backwards countries in Europe, practically a feudal agrarian society. The USA was already a fairly advanced industrial economy.
In 1957, only forty years later, and after suffering the revolution, the First and Second World War, Russia won an important steep in the space race.
Granted, those were very hard times for the Russian people, but, still, credit where it's due.
> In search of a way out of this difficult situation, the government made deliberate efforts that led to an unprecedented industrial boom that began in 1893. The years of this boom were a time of economic modernization of Russia under the auspices of the state.
> Also, in 1915–1917, a large-scale modernization of industry was carried out, and, unlike the pre-war period, most part of the equipment was produced by domestic enterprises
> On the eve of the revolution, the country's national income was 16.4 billion rubles (7.4% of the world total). According to this indicator, the Russian Empire ranked fourth after the United States, Germany and the British Empire.
Roberto is essentially correct, even by your own data. Russia has been 'behind' for literally centuries, even to this day.
In 1910 'Russian Empire' was 170 Million people, the US was 100 Million people. We're talking about 10x GDP per capita.
That would be like the US vs. Morocco today.
Today GDP per capita is $66K US vs. $12K Russia which is substantial.
Russia has, for a long time, hard 'fairly large, inefficient economic base'.
They have power mostly because of their size, and their 'acute' ability to produce things (they have very smart people), and of course their aggressive Imperial view of things.
Serfdom abolished in 1861, by 1917 forth country by GDP. Table I've cited shows increase of share in world production while shares of UK, Germany and France were decreasing. It occupied a leading position in world agriculture.
USSR reintroduced serfdom, peasants had no passports, they could not move into town without permissions [1]. USSR had famines in 1921–1923 and 1932–33, about ten of millions died. Total mismanagement. There was rebirth after Stalins death, if only they've introduced reforms like later in China.
Russia today is mostly resource-based economy [2].
1) Yes, 'Russian Empire' is different than 'Russia' is different than 'USSR' - but in 1910 it was 'The Russian Empire' so I used that as a basis of comparison.
2) It doesn't matter that much if 'Russia version X' share of world economy was 'growing' for some range of a few decades if it's literally 1/10th the per capita economic power of those other nations. It's still a 'way behind'.
In fact, the 'further behind' the quicker growth should be. Most of the 'very poor' nations of the world today are growing very quickly.
'Russia Version X' has always been quite far behind, it's been that way for centuries, since the dawn of what we might even call 'Russia'.
> In fact, the 'further behind' the quicker growth should be. Most of the 'very poor' nations of the world today are growing very quickly.
That's exactly my point. Apply "per capita" to China several decades ago, it does not translate to its status today. It started with 1978 reform [1], per capita would eventually catch up.
> 'Russia Version X' has always been quite far behind ...
That's hand wavy, I can apply same rhetoric to Japan and some periods of China. In parallel universe USSR took required reforms and PRC didn't. Russian Empire had fourth GDP in the world, that's not Morocco, that's economy of Japan or Germany plus pool of cheap labor and natural resources.
You might be interested in this [1] 'Rise and Fall of Great Powers' - they go through the industrial output numbers in great detail from 1500-1950 and articulate Russia's constant problems at length.
And yes, Japan and China were 'way behind' as well in most of the modern era.
Anyway, In 1917, it was the poorest country per capita of Europe except Portugal and suffered the revolution and the first and the second world war. I think is kind of surprising that, starting in that position, they could keep the pace in a race with the USA.
Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, a fascinating read, not an easy read either, but if any HN reader is looking for something... a masterpiece that is true to today across countries and cultures.
I can't see how per capita helps in comparison. I think there were a lot of non industrial states in US, industrial centers and workforce pool is all that matters.
French First Republic too suffered from revolution yet two decades later it (First Empire) conquered much of the Europe. There was no other choice for USSR. All wealth flooded into militaristic complex. System could effectively produce weapon but it could not solve citizens needs.
> In 1917, Russia was one of the most backwards countries in Europe
But the counterfactual isn't stasis. Russia of 1913 was busy on the same sort of government-driven upswing that Germany had ridden a few years earlier, there was lots of modernization going on and lots more planned. The soviet propaganda of course was very keen to downplay this, so they pushed "practically a feudal agrarian society" ideas hard.
At the same time as making Spitnik & submarines, and many many tractors, I think they also never equaled the 1913 harvest. At their peak, perhaps early 60s, they were still importing a lot of food from the prairies. In the 80s, without imports, the calculation was that they'd have been back to WWII levels of rationing.
All that is probably truth (even if serfdom was a thing until 1861 and so late like 1915 they were still dealing with the consequences), but there is a clear historical fact, whatever the soviet propaganda said: people well feed and happy don't start communist revolutions.
You mention Germany. The Bismark government (hardly a communist government) created the first social security program, probably because they were afraid of what could happen if they don't.
Yes there are lots of parallels to Germany, which also took a very state-driven development line in general, and this intensified during the war. I think Lenin's model was explicitly that of WWI germany. Of course the Prussian PR machine didn't sound much like the soviet one, but they were hardly polar opposites.
And the people eating the 1913 harvest didn't start a revolution. The empire fell apart after years of war (as did the Austrians, and the Turks) and then many factions duked it out. And then reconquered all the hungry people who hoped they'd seen the last of guys from Moscow, with guns.
>>"And the people eating the 1913 harvest didn't start a revolution. The empire fell apart after years of war [..]"
I don't think it's so simple. We have to account for the revolution in 1905. The Wikipedia article is a good one (1) and I think it shows the zeitgeist. In my view is the pressure of the system in the peasants and in the proletariat what creates the conditions for 1917, even if the wars were the trigger.
> In 1917, Russia was one of the most backwards countries in Europe, practically a feudal agrarian society.
That "feudal society" had built the Trans-Siberian railway. While it certainly was lagging behind the Western Europe in industrialization, it was a solid second-tier country, like Japan or AH.
No only suffering from the 2nd world war, but undoubtedly being the hardest hit nation.
It's like being a centralized economy really helps when you have to catch-up a competitor, and when the path to achieve that is very well understood. By contrast, market economies shine when innovation is the driver of growth.
Not sure about that. Japan caught up to the West twice and surpassed it in some ways without being a planned economy. Same thing with Germany vs England and France. I think the determiner here is a national will and pride that drives the hard work necessary to modernize. There are plenty of positive feedback loops in free societies as well since modernization brings a lot of everyday improvements that are available to everyone in a market economy. Planned economies lack that particular incentive and often have very negative side effects like famine and political purges that probably hinder modernization efforts.
There was no Marshall Plan for Russia, though. Never mind whether the economies of Japan and Germany were "planned" or not, it was the stated policy of the US and other victors of WWII that they would not be allowed to fail economically.
Russia was more or less devastated, having lost more soldiers and civilians than everyone else except China combined. With Communism, they chose to maintain an adversarial stance towards the West, and they're still paying dearly for it today. The entire history of Russia seems to consist of smart people making one bad decision after another.
People forget that both Germany and Japan did most of their catching up before the world wars. That was the period to which I was referring in the case of Germany.
Maybe Japan was not a planned economy, in the Soviet sense, but it was hardly a model of "laissez-faire" with their zaibatsus and keiretsus and a very clear industrial and protectionist policy implemented from the state.
Japan also had quite a bit of planning. Not at the level that the Soviets had, but much more state direction of which industries to pursue and how they would be funded than US/England ever had, and for most of a century.
For a timeline comparison, we're coming up quick on forty years after the collapse of the USSR and the adoption of a market economy. It's pretty incredible how time flies. I wonder if we'll see a similar transformation.
I wouldn't call this (excellent!) book "alternative-history" at all. It's more like novelized history - the portraits of what it actually took to get things done in the USSR are especially notable.
It could certainly poke holes in a straw man argument.
Mises didn't say a planned economy could produce nothing, but that it would lead to irrational and inefficient use of resources.
USSR military and overall production and eventual collapse demonstrates his argument pretty well.
You can also see that US military spending is another example of irrational and inefficient use of resources allowed by central planning rather than market forces.
You could get an equivalent of price signals by another means - rejection of products that were unfit for use. The Soviet military was able to do this, and so got equipment that was both of good quality and was of the correct mix of products. Civilian enterprises did not have this avenue available, and so ended up getting products of the minimum quality that would still skate by under the Plan's rules.
As a young pup back in the 80s I worked at a research lab that was obsessed with the Typhoon submarine. My first assignment was to test torpedos that could hit the same spot on a submarine. Why? Because the double-hulls of the Typhoon were made of titanium. A Mark 46 could hit it and I doubt the crew would even notice (exaggeration, of course, but you get my point).
My second assignment was to write programs that processed data from a towed sonar array. We were looking for ways to find Typhoon submarines hiding in underwater canyons.
It is funny to me now to see a Typhoon mothballed with tourists crawling all over it. We were honestly scared of this thing.
Our strategy was to engage from the rear and use MK48 to pop the shaft seals. In retrospect, the time to penetrate the bastions meant that the show was over by the time we could engage. The MK50 was meant to defeat the Soviet hulls, again, by the time surface/helo assets were in the bastions the world had ended days ago.
Mark 46 has 50kg of explosives. Not as much as heavy torpedo, but still no submarine in the world will likely be able to continue a mission with damage from it, invariably of whether it had double hull or not. Though, a typhoon would've more likely it simply outran, and outdived it.
Whilst the Akula-class attack subs (not to be confused with NATO-name Akula, the Typhoon SSBN - what this article is about) explicitly moved back to using steel after the Sierra-class used titanium due to cost, I used to work at BAE Systems on Submarine systems / weapons ~17 years ago, and I'd also heard rumours there that the inner hull was Titanium.
Whilst it's not likely that the mission could continue with damage from a Mark 46 (44 KG explosive, btw), it's very likely that the titanium would at least give the submarine a much greater chance of survival than otherwise, as evidenced by the USS Baton Rouge collision in February 1992 with a Sierra-class sub, which suffered much less damage than the American one.
The inner hull supposedly is made of titanium, the outer of steel.
"The Soviet Navy would have to “treat and/or derust each Typhoon’s massive steel outer hull and Titanium inner hulls. Russia may have lost the highly expensive industrial capability to work Titanium for submarines.”" - https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/why-russia-packing-it...
Eh... the Soviets weren't giving us tours back in the 80s. Alls we had to go on was the field data and the intelligence. Of course, I was the assistant to the coffee maker in those days. Nobody shared poop with me because my clearance wasn't high enough. When I asked the engineers why they were working on software for a dual strike they said the Typhoon was tough to kill.
The lab was always working on ways to counter a threat. I was just a junior engineer on one team. The Navy has a lot of money.
Yeah, and I’m actually saying you were right, they were made of titanium. I imagine that maybe we knew that a lot of titanium was going into making it, but maybe not specifically which parts.
What is striking to me is the enormous waste of resources and engineering talent that went in to destructive monstrosities on all sides. I remember having the same reaction visiting a UK air museum seeing the Vulcan up-close for the first time.
Entire generations of the best an brightest roped in to build political brinkmanship tools, never to be used that are now rusting away.
Meanwhile, Japan and Germany, the loosers of WW2 that was meant to be kept down, by not allowing them to participate in the arms race built up formidable industrial capacity, that came to dominate many sectors by the end of the cold war.
'Waste' is the wrong way to look at it. It's like someone looking at the human body and complaining about the huge amount of energy spent collecting waste from the body and passing it out via the urinary tract. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the body didn't generate any waste in the first place and thus didn't need a urinary tract in the first place?
The problem with this scenario is that it is unrealistic, just like assuming there is a way of having an absolutely peaceful world.
A planet with billions of agents each who are moderately self-interested will result in the agents trying to take things from each other by force. To protect themselves, the agents form groups and aggregate their resources, using them to produce war-making abilities that can deter other agents. 'Tis the way of the world.
The wonderful thing is how far we've come in making the world safer over the last 2000 years. In the west we have a largely functional police force and judiciary that will protect and provide justice to every citizen regardless of their political influence
As compared to 2000 years ago of course, as compared to some utopian ideal we have a long way to go, as recent news in the US shows :)
The difference between having 1,000 and 10,000 nuclear weapons is fairly meaningless from a MAD standpoint, but the second still costs ~10 times as much. That’s where the waste is, not simply having a military but having a pointlessly large one.
Worse, it’s even counterproductive. Investing in useful economic assets pays dividends thus increasing your long term military capacity. Buying excessive military hardware on the other hand just gets outdated over time. So, the winning strategy is to spend slightly less than your opposition.
Agree with the need for moderation. But to 'spend slightly less than your opposition' might be insufficient; you don't usually have one opponent but a few. In that case your first opponent knows if you have to spend all your ammunition taking them out you won't have enough resources to fight off the second opponent. So they reason they can push you around quite a bit because you can't afford to retaliate.
IIRC in its heydays the British government had 'the rule of three': a policy of making sure the Royal Navy could take on the top 3 naval powers and still come out ahead. Something like that is what the US is going for today, and I'm not sure they're wrong.
The US has over 5,000 nuclear warheads. That's more than enough to drop 25 on every single country. I don't think there's any scenario justifying that arsenal.
> I don't think there's any scenario justifying that arsenal.
The scenario isn't based on a need to drop 25 nukes on every other country on earth but to be able to get back at anyone even in the case of a massive unwarned pre-emptive strike.
Same on the Russian side, they probably still also have many more warheads than they need to obliterate any chosen enemy.
Also, these systems takes decades to build, I don't think Putin and his leadership was/is particularly afraid of Bush, Obama or Trump planning a massive pre-emptive strike - or vice versa - these systems are probably in place because of presidents long dead and the risk of future presidents who still aren't more than bullies in elementary school.
Pre-emptive Nuclear strikes are shockingly ineffective vs a country the size of the US with Nuclear submarines. The fastest strike from a sub on each of the coasts gives plenty of time for Nukes in strategic locations to be detected and a strike to be launched.
If it was needed, you can also design a bunker to survive a direct strike and launch after the fact. Though subs in the Great Lakes would be most cost effective option for the US.
Trump made a threat of using nuclear force many times if he had to. Other countries being afraid of US having nukes sounds fair. US then having more nukes also makes sense.
Remember US govt spends trillions on the military complex. All that money has to go somewhere.
I think you’re talking about the Naval Defence Act 1889, which stipulates the Royal Navy to maintain the number of battleships to be at least equal to the sum of next largest TWO navies.[0]
Anyway, back to the point of spending just less than what your (main?) opponent do. Another big problem is that back in Cold War days, it is rather hard to work out your opponent’s exact military capability. US use this to their advantage by starting up Strategic Defence Initiative (aka Star Wars Programme) to bluff the Soviets to spend more of their crippling economic capability to their military, ultimately accelerated their collapse.
First, the British navy was a subset of total Britaish military spending.
Still, in that situation diplomacy is generally far more cost effective than military capacity. Also, wars between roughly equivalent militaries don’t end in an afternoon and generally favor defense over offense.
Anyway, remember the British Empire failed, as did the Spanish, French, etc. It’s simply not a long term winning strategy.
> The difference between having 1,000 and 10,000 nuclear weapons is fairly meaningless from a MAD standpoint, but the second still costs ~10 times as much.
Forget about MAD, that was an interim doctrine that faded out in the late 1960s.
Once delivery systems demonstrated sufficient accuracy to hit point targets the doctrine changed to counterforce.
For counterforce, targeting individual weapons and enablers, you need lots of lower-yield warheads. The total yield of the nuclear aresenals actually declined as a result.
Counterforce is a strategy for pre-emptive nuclear strike aka starting a nuclear war when retaliation could occur during transit. Even at the peak of our nuclear capacity we had zero ability to prevent retaliation or a first strike. Thus MAD was the still the core defensive strategy.
At best it was a fig leaf enabling ~10 Trillion dollars in pork spending, but counterforce was hardly a useful military doctrine.
You build your first 1000 warheads and develop a delivery method. Soon the other party develops countermeasures. So you still have 1000 warheads, but the delivery is no longer guaranteed.
You develop a better delivery method, and it's easier to build another 1000 warheads than repurpose the first 1000. You end up with 2000.
It won't be long you will have to build more. As the warheads are not consumed, you end up having more and more. But only 1000 of the latest generation, that really counts.
By far the most expensive component of a nuclear warhead is the enriched uranium, which is much easier to recycle into a new warhead than make from scratch.
Between 1940 and 1996, the U.S. government spent at least $9.49 trillion in present-day terms[5] on nuclear weapons, including platforms development (aircraft, rockets and facilities), command and control, maintenance, waste management and administrative costs. Saving ~8 trillion was very much a viable option. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_of_the_United_...
By comparison China built about 600 warheads since 1964 which was a significant deterrent for the US. The US on the other hand built ~70,000.
PS: The Minuteman-III was in service from 1970 to now, it’s scheduled to be retire in 2030. While bombers where replaced ICBM’s where hardly a quickly outdated weapon.
As in the bombers example, the previous generation is hardly quickly and completely outdated. They're still nukes. And that's exactly the reason to keep them in service.
Then, when a better tech becomes an option, it doesn't replace the previous weapon, it complements it.
So the options are: 1) retire old weapons, recycle them to build weapons which are expected to be better, keep the military potential about the same, reduce costs but still spend a lot and 2) keep what's in service and build a better weapon. Option 1 is hard to justify politicaly. Scraping something perfectly functional that costs billions sounds like a career ending decision. It also affects too many people. Option 2 is almost a guaranteed way to improve military potential, and a way to have a stellar career. Assuming that funding is available.
So yes, the decisions are not always the most economically efficient. That's a wrong objective function. Especially if we're talking about defense.
If the new weapon systems are about as good as the old ones then what’s the point of building them? Presumably there is a significant threshold for spending 100’s of billions of dollars on a significantly improved nuclear stockpile.
Justifying it to the American taxpayer is meaningless when it’s hidden from them. But, justifying it to Congress was just a question of pork spending which is really what the excessive nuclear stockpile was. It’s no accident that all 3 major branches of the military had Nukes, though currently that’s down to Air Force and Navy.
People say the sam thing about ad-tech today. They even using the exact same phase: "Entire generations of the best and brightest".
But look at the innovation that comes from both endeavors and leaks out into the rest of society. Arguably computer technology would not be where it is without the war machine driving the initial innovation.
And similarly, web technology, such as Javascript and just the ability to update a webpage without reloading it wouldn't exist without ad-tech.
The war machine brought about some tangible technological achievements (although of course in an incredibly wasteful process), but even more, the arms race was driven by technological progress in civilian economy: all improvements and inventions of civilian economy had to be put into military equipment and forced new generations of planes, tanks, guns.
Market based economies and state sponsored science are pretty solid at bringing about progress and the trillions in military spending that could have reasonably been saved since WW2 would have have lifted all boats and would have provided money for better education, telescopes, particle accelerators and many other things we can't even conceptualize, since so many ressources were squandered.
And regarding ad-tech: similar thing. All that money that goes into it is paid for by us through the products we buy, plus we are manipulated by it so our decisions are all worse. Do away with it and we would have better things all around.
There are many things which the US brought into being, which could not have been achieved commercially, as the ROI is too far away and dilute. The military has long term objectives and spending priority like nothing else -- except perhaps NASA in the 1950-1970 period, and even that was tied up with the space race and the military. We certainly would not have GPS, 20cm satellite imaging and many other things.
Culturally, humans are short term focused. It takes a big abstraction tied to real core needs to get us to do anything long term. God(s), the tribe, survival, basically sex and death.
Ad tech is about tomorrow. Surveillance+capitalism was our only long term bet of late, but I think we're pivoting to systematic mass disinformation.
Perhaps not, but a world without computers would be markedly different from the world we live in, whereas a world without Javascript and the ability to update a webpage without reloading it would be... pretty much just like the world we're living in now, except perhaps less annoying.
Most of the big-data processing stack (Hadoop, Spark, Tez, HBase etc) only really exists because adtech companies needed to process mountains of garbage logs and cookie data in daily batch jobs. So they developed big-data libraries capable of it.
But those technologies are now used pretty widely across the whole tech industry, including in the hard sciences.
and don't forget. The internet porn industry pretty much invented the streaming video tech. we all take for granted. In fact, there use to be a saying that no Internet innovation can be considered a success until it has been adopted by the online porn industry.
If I had to go back to Mapquest to get away from a web experience that leaves about 10% of the screen for actual content, while harassing users about cookies, showing 3 different ad banners, having a sidebar with 40 unrelated teases, autoplaying a video, and tracking me so precisely that they can figure out what I'm going to do before I even realize it myself, then, yes, I'd make that trade. Every day of the week, and twice on Sunday. All of this is made possible by Javascript.
So you can tell me that Javascript is important, and I won't argue that, but it's like nuclear power. It can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you. (With apologies to Dilbert.) It seems like Brendan Eich is a nice guy, but if he knew how people would use JS to make the average top-100 site today -- and make page loads take several seconds over a gigabit ethernet connection on one of the world's fastest laptops -- would he do it all over again?
Google maps is almost useless for the last mile(s) now that its quality has declined so much that no street names are present except in worthlessly unzoomed views.
Google maps was better than Mapquest when Google first put theirs on line, and better than either one is any more.
Google has simply declined below the baseline by failing to be as useful as they once were.
Mapquest remains more performant if less popular by comparison.
A reasonable explanation is that Google engineers & business operators are not as advanced as they were 20 years ago, likely not as dissimilar to average employees elsewhere any more.
This kind of thing is more common than you think.
From what I understand of the 21st century hiring process that is expected.
We can debate whether or not javascript took off because of adtech, I will concede that.
But I think you'd be hard pressed to provide evidence that the web would be better without Javascript. Yes, people abuse javascript and make it do awful things, but think about all the good things Javascript enables.
On reddit, you can comment without reloading the page thanks to javascript.
There are ton of great games that are all in javascript.
Simple things like when you log into a webpage and it shows your username in the corner.
Status notification on webpages.
Being able to make a request and then continue working while the request processes.
Javascript is a tool, and I'd say it's a tool that makes things better overall.
It's of course subjective, but I've recently rediscovered an old browser-based game from around 2000, pure PHP, zero javascript, zero development in a decade. Just fast-loading websites representing an updated game-state of travelling through space, mining and fighting in real time. Perfect.
If you comment on reddit, don't you watch the page to confirm your comment went up? So not necessarily a productivity gain through Javascript. Conscious reloading is nice as there is no distraction: You take an action to see new state like login, new messages and notifications. Again, totally subjective.
There were plenty of games made with Flash, so game dev tools were developed independent of ad-tech.
Of course not, the page is static, but the game runs in real time on the server, so you could be in danger and have to refresh/move to find out. The point is, and it is subtle, you never get distracted by a website and some self-updating elements until you decide to pay attention and take some action (refresh). It works and is very simple.
I assume this is oGame or similar? When I was in high school I had a lot of fun learning Javascript/HTML in the console & TamperMonkey to create shortcut menus, faster actions, track area activity, etc.
The modern versions of these use a lot more Javascript for countdown timers, and while that's nice the pages usually feel slower.
The innovations that have come out of military efforts are impressive, but can seem a bit limited if you realize just how vast military spending can be.
I suspect we'd have made decades of progress if we'd truly dumped all the funds spent on military efforts in the 20th century into research.
Not to mention the lost opportunity cost of making millions of people have the occupation of soldier, rather than something more productive.
Most of the ex soldiers I know transformed for the better in the army. Admittedly this is selection bias, because all the ones I know now work in tech. But the ones that do, learned leadership and teamwork in the army. So it did at least help those people.
There are military schools all over the world. Some of them are to prepare students for actual military service, but others are just trying to have the same sort of dicipline.
But generally people don't seem to view it as the most effective form of education. The time spent on any military discipline or studies is time taken away from some other subject.
War is destructive enough to make it all not worth it.
That's its job.
Excess preparation for war is resource distribution, with variable effects on perceived prosperity.
Stockpiling guns & ammo costs many people a lot but others make their money this way.
Not as much as actually deploying or fully waging a war though.
With military discipline and strategy another problem comes when the myth is perpetuated about this being the strongest form of discipline and best approach to overcoming objectives in other challenging pursuits.
The complete faultiness of a military-style chain-of-command for non-military purposes is often overlooked simply because when such a visible chain is in place aboard something like a corporation, it is recognizable and familiar.
Too bad.
If you want to get the most out of your resources you're going to need a lot stronger and more effective discipline than the military, and a whole lot different style chain-of-command, from top to bottom.
Preparing for exponential growth requires a naturally different mindset compared to preparing for exponential mutual destruction.
Yes, porn has always been a big driver of entertainment technology. Some would say the same things about porn resource usage as they do about adtech. :)
The way I heard it, Cern could be considered to be indirectly financed by the war machine as it was essentially provided as a playground for Europe’s atomic scientists to stop any one nation running away with the ball.
Similarly ITER and the whole fusion research project is a jobs program to maintain a population of high-neutron-flux physicists to draw on for weapons work. (There will be no fusion power.) But has anything useful spun off? Maybe plasma dynamics maths.
Inertial confinement drove development of short-pulse lasers, which are good for research into chemical reaction dynamics.
Yes there is some truth in this, I think. It seemed entirely plausible (at least to politicians) in the 50s that the scientists might well come up with something else on the scale of the bomb.
It's not either-or, it's all of the above. Military, commercial surveillance ("adtech"), finance, healthcare, legal, institutional administration. None of these things are entirely useless, but are still mostly zero-sum or redundant waste. Technological progress is continually making us more productive, but instead of realizing the gains (eg full time employment being under 10 hours per week by now), our economy is structured to keep creating endless make-work jobs. We're trapped in a paperclip maximizer for human labor.
I've lost track, which is A now? Only Facebook and Google are adtech, Apple wants to sell hardware and Amazon wants to do retail, adtech/surveillance capitalism could be banned tomorrow and both the A's would not skip a beat.
A substantial proportion of the brightest people from my generation in the UK went to work in the city of London, where they were paid handsomely for moving numbers around spreadsheets for big finance companies. What a waste.
I’d love to see a thorough analysis on the technological externalities of the Cold War. How many decades would we be set back technologically if it never happened? I’d say at least 20 years.
If anything, I'd attribute the popularity of (client-side) Javascript to the iPhone for inspiring the industry to kill off Flash, and iOS has to be the most hostile (relatively) OS to advertising.
in my mind, it was whoever decided to start using XMLHttpRequest and then jquery that made people start looking closer at Javascript. Prior to those two things, Javascript was not taken seriously at all.
US paid 22% of NATO’s military and civilian budget [0]. No other developed country spends 3+% on fighter jets, drones etc. It’s just a waste of ressources and does not bring any peace and protection to the world.
Russia invades Germany: yeah, I’d rather learn Russian than become the nuclear playground for the US and Russia. The world stage has seen enough examples. Like WHY exactly would Russia or China start a war with anybody? Nukes would end the world as we know it. Don’t need 100, just a handful.
Russia is a great example. Russia and China push the envelope whenever they can. The idea is that the US won't just nuke anyone that invades someone else, but they can provide ground/air support (sans nukes).
So that's why just having the nukes isn't enough. They're mostly just there so that the US/allies don't get nuked, not good for much else (but very good for that).
Ok, what do you mean by “Russia and China push the envelope wherever they can”? Like in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria and Libya?
“We know that over 182,000 civilians have died from direct war related violence caused by the US, its allies, the Iraqi military and police, and opposition forces from the time of the invasion through November 2018.” [0]
Again, the general idea of both nuclear and non-nuclear brinkmanship is to avoid WWIII or anything close to it. Starting and participating in relatively small wars[1] does not change that calculus.
[1] I say small because WWII killed 85,000,000 in 6 years. The goal is to avoid that (or worse), not to avoid all death by war period.
Listen, personally I would recommend you visit countries abroad for a change - like China, Russia, India or Europe (pick any they are all nice) and leave your US bubble.
Nobody * has reason to start random wars abroad and people are not excited spending billions of dollars on weapons to nuke innocent civilians.
Just assume that people you don’t know (abroad or not) are guys like you - having no interest in nuking or bombing others or starting wars; but they are generally worried about their families and mortgages.
Wars are fabricated by a small group of people in power that gain from buying and selling death. Wars are inherently inefficient and a waste of resources.
Edit: * Well, I guess Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Laos, Libya, Syria and many others would disagree....
Definitely not a winning strategy to assume things about people you don't know and condescend to them based on your (incorrect) assumptions. I have literally been to all of those countries (probably more than you have), and have lived in Europe for 10 years. I've also lived in Asia.
When I say China is pushing the envelope, I'm talking about their actions in Hong Kong, the South China Sea, Taiwan, and more.
When I say Russia is pushing the envelope, I'm talking about Georgia, Ukraine, Syria, etc.
You're making a bunch of points that I don't disagree with (average people don't want war / war is not economically productive), followed by a single point which undermines the rest of your thesis ("small group of people in power"). It doesn't matter what Average Joe Russia does/wants if the people that actually have power in Russia are doing something else. Ditto for China. Nobody is claiming that all Chinese people are rabid expansionists, just that the people who matter are.
Both China and Russia have clearly demonstrated that they want to expand their real power / strengthen it in places where they already have soft power. If the US wasn't around to stick navies in contested waters, wag its finger, flex its muscles, and impose sanctions, most people think the world would not be as peaceful as it is. As you've pointed out, this still isn't as peaceful as it could be, and that's something to be worked on. But that doesn't change the fact that it could also be much, much worse.
US spent 6.4 TRILLION in the Middle East on wars. None of that was ever “to avoid WWIII”.
It cost every working American 42,000 USD. These wars cost the lives of almost 1 mio people and 21 mio were displaced. [0]
Do you honestly believe this was for the good of the world and necessary to prevent WWIII? I am not even suggesting something like “why don’t you spend all that budget on a better health care system, free education and racial equality” because I know that would just push blood pressure. But I know that you won’t worry so much about these insane spendings - because your children and grand-children will have to pay back all the debt these irresponsible arguments accumulated. So smart your generation has been!
WWII was a consequence of WWI. Germans are pretty chill these days and complain about increasing military budgets. So who should ever want to start WWIII???
And just for the sake of completing an argument: you do know, that Europe is now taking financial responsibility and giving shelter to those people in the Middle East whose livelihoods were destroyed, right? The refugee crisis is not “a natural occurrence”. Europe learned its lesson and prefers spending money on helping others rather than showcasing military strength and gadgets.
So what portion of the US Defense budget then is doing good for Nato, world-peace and avoiding WWIII? We rules out the spendings in the Middle East then? If you do not support the most obvious and on-going wars - how can you trust your government that they do the right thing?
I’m at a loss here. I keep hearing you say that others push the envelope and the US constantly prevents WWIII... But then again - they are the only ones constantly at war and nobody knows why.
> Listen, personally I would recommend you visit countries abroad for a change - like China, Russia, India or Europe (pick any they are all nice) and leave your US bubble.
Russia invaded Georgia in 2008[0]. Russia has taken over Crimea, a part of Ukraine in 2014[1]. Sweden plans to increase their military spending because of Russia's actions[2]. Estonia is upping its sea defenses[3].
I'm sure that the majority of Russians would prefer not to go to war. They have their own problems - a drug epidemic, a demographic implosion, and a quickly declining economy. Then there are the oligarchs. But, given the right carrot and stick (mostly stick), I see no reason why they wouldn't invade a neighboring country. Because, the small group of people you mention, those gangsters at the top, they have a lot of big sticks to motivate people to sign up for the army and do terrible things to their neighbors.
FYI, I've lived half of my life in Europe. Eastern Europe. The threat of Russia is always present in the back of people's heads. And they like NATO safety. No, they wouldn't prefer to welcome Russia and learn Russian. They like their life, they like their cultures, and yes, they are even so barbaric as to want to defend their life and culture with their lives by standing up to Russia.
How many wars did the US and China engage in over the past couple of decades and how many civilians were killed (in comparison)? Just curious in finding out who has the moral high ground here.
If the US weren't spending on its military, Germany and Japan would likely need to spend much more. Japan especially.
The US protects G7 interests from Russia, China, and the oil cartel.
Russia takes what it can with impunity, but they're constrained to their immediate neighbors out of fear of the US and NATO. China is beginning to behave the same way. In the coming decades, they'll likely begin to act more aggressively.
I predict military spending will need to increase and that there is a coming arms race.
Once China's military surpasses the US, we'll have nuclear subs off every coast ready at a moment's notice. Shipping and energy interests will be fiercely defended.
We're going to enter Cold War II, and it's not going to be fun. Let's hope it stays cold.
Nuclear submarines like this have prevented the world from going to war because some crazy idiot could think he had first strike advantage. Not a bad waste of engineering, especially if not used. In terms of warfare, this is the optimal result.
In general I agree with your sentiment. War = bad.
Being a pacific that eschews all ability to make war is not the pinnacle of evolution. At least not in my view of things. A truly evolved species will retain the power to protect innocent again harm and violence, but only use that horrible type of power expressly that purpose.
What we need is the kind of tech they have in The Culture series by Iain Banks.
They have "effectors", which is highly advanced tractor beam-style technology that allows you to manipulate matter from a distance with a precise field, which can obviously be used for all sorts of scientific / constructive pursuits. But in times of war, the effectors can be used for all kinds of defensive/destructive shenanigans as well.
They have "effectors", which is highly advanced tractor beam-style technology that allow you to manipulate matter from a distance with a precise field, which can obviously be used for all sorts of scientific / constructive pursuits
They also have gridfire, a weapon more potent than anti-matter.
Yep, though as with effectors, I'm fairly certain the technology/equipment that enables gridfire is the same that enables hyperspace travel, so it is also dual purpose in peace and war time.
Once again showing that The Culture is the coolest idea of a Utopia ever conceived.
Japan and Germany could do what they did because they were under the US protection of those brinkmanship tools.
Furthermore, military tech has a huge impact on everyday life (jet engines, satellites, communications). Even when the tech was not directly invented by the military, it was still at some time a major customer or patron of the tech.
Protection from whom? Never in the history of time has Russia ever attacked Germany...
If we learned anything post-WW II it is that you cannot win wars with technological superiority and they look like a huge waste of ressources. Vietnam, Afghanistan anyone?
What would have been the incentive for either side to start a war that would end civilisation for all times?
I do understand that a lot of well paid people had us buy weapons we don’t need for decades; they did a good job in convincing our parents and their parents that evil is just about to make its move.
Just spend less money and have a compulsory military service. Young men without any military ambition from the very society they are supposed to protect are just very eager not doing anything and not shooting anybody up - until shit really hits the fan in their home country and they have to.
It's good that people had jobs and science and technology was advanced. It's bad that it was done under the auspices of war and creating machines for killing and destruction. It's good some of those machines didn't get used.
It's unfortunate that humans can find the resources for war but can't find the resources to help fellow humans. But in some sense, the department of defense is a massive jobs program not just in the direct hires but also in the large military industrial complex of military contractors (and you see this in the way politicians work to keep military bases open and contracts for useless jets going) that, as long as we don't go to war, is arguably a net positive.
I wish we could admit how much of a jobs program it is and use that money and effort directly for good things.
Alice: Why do you have that cannon in your front yard?
Bob: To keep the tigers away.
Alice: But there are no tigers around here.
Bob: See? It works.
- - - -
It's hard to credit now, but I recall the real existential dread of the bomb. Reagan talking about the "Evil Empire". As a kid I was scared of nuclear war.
Today we still have the nukes but everybody's pretty relaxed about it. Hypersonic weapons are on the horizon (not literally, thank God) which are crazy destabilizing to the international détente. No one cares. "War is so last century."? "Space Force"!? We're not out of the woods yet.
The hippies were right: peace and love are the answers.
"What is striking to me is the enormous waste of resources and engineering talent that went in to destructive monstrosities on all sides."
To me, this is like looking at our ability to treat trauma patients and saying "what a waste - if those people weren't hurt in the first place, these great minds could work on something else".
Well, sure. And if gravity didn't exist people wouldn't fall and get hurt. But it does exist. And so does war.
Yeah, but it wasn't the most straightforward way to go about building a supersonic airliner.
The sad thing is that the Vulcan was one of three submission to The UK government to build a long range bomber. The military wanted the Vulcan, but it was seen as risky due to its advanced technology. So they orderd the Vulcan and the Victor, a less risky design as backup. Then they got cold feet and orderd the Valiant too just in case. So they ended up designing 3 entirely different planes with the same Mission profile. Oh, yes then they bought some B-29 Just in case....
Wasteful, sure. But who here isn’t familiar with triple redundancy for mission critical applications? And what’s more mission critical during the Cold War?
I’m with you on this one. The money spent on building expensive rust buckets never used could easily have been redirected more productively to building industrial capability or better healthcare.
I love that at the end they have the instructions for how to properly pressurize the toilet so it would flush. And warnings to make sure you flush it properly or you’ll be severely punished because people live near the head in that sector.
I'm surprised about the relative space. I once toured a Los Angeles-class sub (sorry, no photos) and I never felt I had enough headroom. Seeing all that open space in "workout area" and the "lounge area" and a lot of headroom was very strange.
The Russian nuclear submarines are just crazy big compared to the American ones (or anything made by anyone else for that matter)
Typhoon class has a displacement of 48000 tons.
Los Angeles class has displacement of 6927 tons. Typhoon class is a bit under 7 times bigger. Even the largest American sub (Ohio class) is still less then half the size of a Typhoon (the largest submarines ever built) at 18750 tons
edit: As a side not Russians have mainly moved away from the old Typhoon and replaced it with Borei class which is half the size (24000 tons). Only 1 Typhoon class sub is still in active service.
The Japanese I-400-class submarines/submersible aircraft carriers, which I believe are still the largest diesel submarines built, were under 7000 tons.
> which I believe are still the largest diesel submarines built
According to the internet you seem to be right, the Qing-class gets very close but not quite there: wiki lists 6628t, versus 6670t for the for the I-400.
Typhoon was made from two two parallel full length pressure hulls and three smaller pressure hulls (and missiles tubes ) between them inside one outer hull.
Attack submarines are much smaller than missile subs. I don't understand exactly why this is and what the trade offs are here - manoeuvrability, cost? They seem to need approximately the same size crew of 100-150.
The closer comparison would be to the US Ohio-class missile sub, which is 3x the size of the LA class with the same complement.
> Attack submarines are much smaller than missile subs. I don't understand exactly why this is
SLBM are big, a Trident II is 13.6m long and 2.11m wide[0] and Ohios need to fit them straight up plus the hull, so we're talking 14m moulded depth or so (excluding the sail), and a pretty similar beam, at which point… you just have a big sub, because it can't exactly be a ball: you need to fit 12 Tridents in a row, plus the reactor, engine, crew compartments, passages for the crew to move around, torpedo tubes, and enough stores to last for literally months.
Attack subs can have vertically mounted cruise missiles but those are puny compared to an SLBM, a Tomahawk is 6.25m long with booster[1]: an Ohio-class carries 24 Tridents in SSBN configuration, if converted to SSGN it carries 154 tomahawks.
Los Angeles carries 37, Seawolf carries 50 (and on both this competes with torpedoes and anti-ship missiles, on an Ohio you get 24 tridents or 154 tomahawks plus a dozen torpedoes or anti-ship missiles).
[0] and Typhoon's SLBMs were even larger at 16.1m by 2.4
SLBM are big, a Trident II is 13.6m long and 2.11m wide[0] and Ohios need to fit them straight up plus the hull, so we're talking 14m moulded depth or so (excluding the sail),
There are designs that use the sail, the North Koreans are using that configuration. They took old Romeo class and extended the sail back along the hull to fit 3 launch tubes. But the tubes extend so far down into the hull that they have had to remove batteries in order to do it. Which is a pretty severe compromise as what you absolutely want in such a sub is endurance.
Interestingly they have designated those missiles Pukkuksong, which translates as... Polaris!
Technically they don't need to, but storing them vertically means you don't have to surface to launch: if you can make the missiles buoyant (at will, usually by pumping gas or vaporising a bunch of water when you want to launch them) they'll pop out the water like corks at which point the rocket engines fire and off it goes. This means your sub can stay safe and secure below the waves while launching.
Why do you need them vertically stored for that scenario? Couldn't you make the front of the missile more buoyant than the rest, so once you pop it out of the sub it self-rights and likewise pops out of the water?
I imagine flipping from horizontal to vertical would put stresses on the rocket body, so there are engineering problems to solve, but still it's surprising that the only way to solve that problem has to been to build a launch platform 5 or 10 times bigger than is otherwise desirable.
> Why do you need them vertically stored for that scenario? Couldn't you make the front of the missile more buoyant than the rest, so once you pop it out of the sub it self-rights and likewise pops out of the water?
That would make the entire thing more complicated with more chances of failure because now the SLBM wobbles around when it tries to right itself up (on a non-aerodynamic axis so more chance it'll move wrong), you need much bigger openings for the missiles, and your gain will be limited: remember, they're 2m wide so if you stack them by 4 you still need 9m for the missiles alone except now you also need to have 3 rows of missiles meaning you need a lot of extra horizontal space (in the current configuration the missile compartment of an Ohio is about 40m, it'd need to be 60+). It also makes the launch procedure take longer, as the missile can't accelerate as fast out of its casing: it doesn't just pop straight up like a cork anymore.
Also, reportedly Soviet ballistic missiles were/are less accurate than US ones, so they compensated by having a bigger bang, in turn needing a bigger missile to launch it.
Another solution would be to do what the North Korean missile subs, putting the missile tubes in the (lengthened) sail.
> Another solution would be to do what the North Korean missile subs, putting the missile tubes in the (lengthened) sail.
The US used to have something like this in the Regulus, their intended launcher (the Grayback-class) essentially had hangars.
The great advantage of SLBMs is that the vertical mounting and a good enough launch sequence means you don't have to surface to launch: https://youtu.be/sUlXty69-Y8
You need a certain diameter of the pressure hull in order to accommodate the length of the missiles and their launch tubes. Also a factor - the range of the missile. Want a longer range? You'll need more fuel and the missile gets longer. Which means you need a bigger sub.
The Ohio-class carries 24 60-ton Trident missiles, 1,440 tons of dead weight. That doesn't seem like enough on its own to justify the difference in displacement of 18,000 tons vs 6,000 on the Los Angeles-class. (I'm just getting these numbers from Wikipedia so may misunderstand something)
"24 60-ton Trident missiles". wow, so let's say each has a MIRV with 5 W88 warheads at 500KT each. That's about 120 independently targetable warheads (each 6-7x more powerful than the Fatman nuclear weapon dropped on Nagasaki) per submarine. Wikipedia says they are on 14 Ohio class subs operated by the US. That's 1,680 total but let's say only 75% are operational at a time. So the US Trident II SLBM cocked-locked-ready-to-rock capability is around 1.3K 500KT warheads alone. That's... a lot.
More like half active, a quarter in port or in light maintenance, a quarter in deep maintenance. Realistically, two always on station from each fleet, sometimes four. Enough to maintain second strike deterrence even with enemy attack subs to contend with.
It also important to note that once an SSBN launches, there will likely be return fire from either land or sea based ballistic missiles that will boil the ocean for 50nm, incoming in 30-60 minutes. So tactically it is hard to launch just one nuke... It's full commitment or nothing. Just another cheery aspect of escalation dynamics.
> So the US Trident II SLBM cocked-locked-ready-to-rock capability is around 1.3K 500KT warheads alone. That's... a lot.
Aside from overstating operational readiness, you also upped the W88 yield from it's actual 455KT and, while most sources do reported that 4-5 warheads per missile is typical, you assumed all in the fleet or W88s, while they seem to be a mix of W88 and 90KT W76.
So it's a lot less ready to go than you've estimated here.
> Attack submarines are much smaller than missile subs. I don't understand exactly why this is
Because a missile sub is, loosely, an attack sub with an ICBM base strapped to it. (Yes, technically SLBMs aren't ICBMs, but late Cold War SLBMs had ranges greater than the upper end for IRBMs, and so would be ICBMs if land based.)
> and what the trade offs are here - manoeuvrability, cost?
The boomer trades off maneuverability for the ability to destroy a moderate-size country with nuclear hellfire from thousands of miles away.
Your comparing a fast attack sub to a ballistic missile sub. The Typhoon is nearly twice as large. Compare instead an Alfa or Akula class Russian fast attack.
Los Angeles-class are fast attack boats, they are much smaller than boomers, which is what the Typhoon class is (they carry nuclear warheads). But Typhoon class is even larger than the American boomers (Ohio class - and the soon to be Columbia class).
Was there a soviet-era clone of this phone? Or maybe Ericsson (Sweden) actually exported this to the Soviet Union during the 70s? That metallic red facia/dial cover thing looks decidedly non-scandinavian-market.
After tearing one down as a kid in the 80s I can attest to its mechanical robustness; I can certainly see why the soviet military would pick this model for their new submarine class in 1976.
Could be, I'm pretty sure we had the exact same phone in the 90's.
The USSR was pretty good at copying western tech and calling it their own. And they'd mass produce the shit out of everything, for the military, for civilians, everyone would get the same thing.
In retrospect it's kinda sad/funny that our "mortal enemy" at the time were using a clone of our landline phones.
This was the same era when Sweden spent an insane amount of the national economy (like 5%) to develop and build a very large number of Draken and Viggen aircraft in order to defend Sweden in case the Soviets decided to invade.
As an anecdote this is why the emergency number in Sweden used to be 90 000, in the dark or in a smoke-filled room you'd be able to feel your way to the last number(9), and then pull four short times from 0 to the finger stop to get emergency service.
It's fascinating that they thought about a swimming pool in a submarine, and also a galley and toilet in SU-34, another very fascinating Soviet design.
I was also wondering about the swimming pool! Is it meant to be one of those stationary lap pools or more of a lounging pool? Looked pretty small (although everything is on a submarine).
It's funny that we always associate soviet technology as crude and uncomfortable, but in some instances, they are actually more comfortable; (Not always, sometimes)
For me, it was an extraordinarily well-made movie, one of my favorites. I was a film major, though, so I am concentrating on the camerawork and editing. The director, John McTiernan, was not famous enough --- right up there with Spielberg in his ability to compose scenes, https://vimeo.com/76739972
Odd question, how much air were these things leaking? I know there were containers with pressurized air (not only to refill chambers after torpedo was launched or cleared..). But I wonder how air tight submarines actually are.
No air was lost - any pinholes that let air out would also have let water in, because when submerged the water was at a much higher pressure than the interior of the sub. Plus, think of the effect on crew morale!
They are not that air-tight... see this cat on one of the pictures (https://pics.livejournal.com/igor113/pic/001g7xxp). He was a part of a cat unit used to test submarines for air-tightness. Soviets would lock such unit up on a submarine for a week... if cats are dead, submarine is air-tight. One of the picture survived! Though I heard that cat survivability was close to 100%. Only reported cat fatalities were due to bad food.
So, obviously, this looks hilariously dated in 2020. But even in 1990, when The Hunt for Red October was something of a phenomenon, if you were into computers this looked pretty dated. What I've subsequently come to realise, of course, through friends whose jobs involve maintenance of military equipments, is that most of it is pretty dated. I really start to wonder if, like Google with its servers back in the day, one couldn't build military systems that were capable and credible from off the shelf components, rather than paying billions to the military-industrial complex.
They often do. But the long lifetime and extremely focused role of this equipment means it rarely changes.
And I'm not sure the ballistic missile submarine computing market is ripe for disruption, or that less than a few billion is a reasonable cost target for a nuclear powered stealth multi megaton missile silo.
But a lot of the cost is due to making sure that things work in harder conditions than office/home, that the parts can be repaired quickly, etc. It also usually has to work for longer than typical lifespan targeted by server vendors (3-5 years for normal server, 20-30 years for industrial/military hw)
All of those requirements also mean that there's less made, so you have less exploitation of economies of scale - even if you use COTS chips, the market for, let's say, OpenVPX SBCs with specific connector configuration is pretty small. So even efforts to commoditise parts run into problems like that.
Worth a note is how in aeronautics the western countries and the USSR developed an artificial horizon with completely different display (direct vs. indirect):
A lathe and some tools isn't that expensive. As a rough guess, that one is probably something like $20k worth of tools. Maybe double that including the cost of the floor space? Changing course and getting deliveries at sea is really expensive, so easy to imagine it'd pay for itself if you need it just once.
Zeppelins like the Graff and Hindenburg had machine shops onboard as well!
Their engines were very unreliable, they could do overhauls mid-flight. Airplanes around that time were just as unreliable, but flew shorter hops. Had to overhaul or swap their engines quite regularly between flights.
On a ship you can’t carry every spare part you might need. So you carry raw materials and have a machine shop on board to fabricate anything you need. Modern navies are very interested in 3D printing for the same reasons.
Cool Pictures! Lathe! Neat! I am an old school trained navy machinist. We use to hang the long stringy chips from the over head. The angle of the dangle = power of the puke in heavy seas.
BTW, US subs don't have lathes, well at least the smaller ones don't. You can do a lot with a hack saw, files, cold chisels, etc, if you have to. The small US frigates have a lathe, with a milling attachment!
Is everything still that exposed on modern submarines?
Everything looks engineered, it’s nice in its own way but as a final product I would imagine that something designed to be more upbeat and tidy can be beneficial for the psychology of the crew.
When thinking about the "Cold War" the emphasis in the submarine community was on "War", not "Cold". US and Soviet submariners played an intense game of cat-and-mouse for decades. The ICBMs on Typhoon and Trident were there to enforce the "mutually assured" part of mutually assured destruction. Typhoon's mission was to carry ~200 nuclear bombs with a guaranteed strike-second capability.
In that environment, wouldn't you rather have our crews sharp and focused?
I wondered as well, but it seems entirely plausible. This thing had about the same crew size as an Ohio class submarine but more than double the volume.
This class of submarines was designed to spend a long time underwater on patrols. The problems faced by the crew are comparable to problems facing long term space missions, except there was higher chance of returning to port.
Because of that, Typhoons were designed with crew comfort in mind, with lots of amenities, ensuring crew performance after several months underwater.
No need to pay if you know somebody. May be a bottle of good vodka/cognac to smooth introduction to the friend of the friend :). I grew up on a Navy base, and back in 90ies visiting my hometown we'd drink and enjoy sauna on a big active service Navy ship with my childhood friends who served there at the time (as officers of course). Of course if you're an "American spy" nobody would let you even come into the town, and an unknown person trying to pay money out of the cold to for example get some photos/etc. is a sure way to get branded as one :)
Compared to World War 2 or especially World War 1 diesel submarines this looks pretty comfy and not as claustrophobic. I guess it helps to have a nuclear reactor that gives you plenty off energy.
> I never considered the fact that submarines can have windows.
That space would be free-flooding when submerged. I'll bet that it makes coming into and out-of port much easier environmentally on the topside crew. Soviet submarine bases were much farther to the north than Americans'.
Outside the main pressure hull. Its filled with water (flooding) that isn't directly pumped in, but freely flows in and escapes via strategically-placed louvers.
LOL at the exhortations to properly flush the toilet, not put toilet paper into the toilet, and close the door after using the toilet because "there are people living in the compartment". I can only imagine what things smelled like after 3+ months underwater.
The state of this submarine kind of shows the Soviet approach to everything. They spend enormous amounts of money to build those submarines - and then did not even care to take care of rust inside, or to support them.
Supposedly those submarines are not active any more (probably explains the photos), but the typical state of "not caring about things" is a very communist approach. Even in military.
Compare this with the American approach of caring about quality.
I mean, probably better for everyone if their ships go down as often as they go down, but just wanted to make an insight on mentality.
I'm surprised it's so dirty and rusty. American crews clean their ships, then they clean them again if they run out of clean things to clean. I'm sure budget plays a large role but I couldn't stop looking at the rust, chipped paint, and dirt.
Based on Wikipedia, I'm guessing this was TK-17 and 20 as TK-12/13 were probably scrapped before these picture were taken.
TK-17 and TK-20 where officially decommissioned in 2004/2006. They were probably effectively decommissioned years before that but it'd make bad PR to say so. The pictures are from 2009 so that's many years sitting neglected with probably just enough people to keep the reactor alive and theft at bay.
These photos are from 11 years ago, and in the comments from 2009 they're saying how they'd already been neglected for a long time so they may have been rusting for a decade or more even then. I wonder what they look like now.
