A Classic of Soviet Engineering - The Typhoon-class sub
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Don't underestimate engineering because it is done in a less than elegant way, if the problem got solved and the device fulfilled the requirements and it was within the budget then it was a good design.
As for the under water stab at the MIG 29, that was a design where the Russian designers probably outdid their Western counterparts in many ways.
I'm a Russian and I imagine I'm reasonably cognizant of actual Soviet achievements. The notion that these were reached by plucky engineering and can-do spirit rather than, largely, oppression and coercion is absurd.
Yes, that's true.
> I'm a Russian and I imagine I'm reasonably cognizant of actual Soviet achievements.
ok
> The notion that these were achieved largely by plucky engineering and can-do spirit rather than, largely, oppression and coercion is absurd.
Whether oppression and coercion were part of it is not something I can or would like to comment on, I assume it was because of what I know about a bit of that from people working for defense projects in the 'sovblock' before the fall of the wall.
But that does not detract from the quality of the engineering.
I think that the budgetary constraints forced the Russian engineers to look for the simpler, and often more reliable solutions whereas their Western counterparts often took a more development oriented approach.
Jacques, you're one of my favorite posters here, but I really disagree with this sentiment. In the top post you wrote:
"they designed that thing on a budget that was probably a very small fraction of what the design of its American counterpart cost and it was just as deadly"
-- That's a terrible sentiment. The reason American things cost more is they can't just grab a scientist or engineer and say, "Build this for us, or else..." Yes, we can admire some Soviet weaponry and machinery (the Kalashnikov rifle is amazing for what it's good at, in particular) - but we should also mention the very real costs and atrocities they committed to get these projects done. Saying that they did it on a smaller budget than the Americans is false - their budget was less cash and more violence. Some amazing weaponry came out of totalitarian states - Nazis with rocketry, Soviets with durable machinery - but we should remember the very real costs of human misery, literally human blood, sweat, and tears that were forced into the production of those weapons.
But we're talking about a piece of pretty heavy artillery here, a nuclear submarine meant to kill people, wholesale. Now, I didn't set the stage for that, someone else did.
As far as the methods and the means of the former SovBlock countries goes, I lived in Poland before the fall of the wall for a while and it taught me a lot. For one it taught me how the people in a country like that are to some extent complicit by refusing to stand up for their fellow man when it matters.
The Nazis, the Soviets they were pretty bad in their days. But don't overlook the small detail that we today are pretty bad in many other ways, and we are also complicit.
We should remember, I'm very much in favor of that. So lets work to create a world in which weapons such as this will be reminders of the period that will hopefully be called 'the crazy years' when looked back at from some arbitrary point in the future.
But don't confuse the engineer with the puppet master. Those guys did their jobs to the best of their ability, what pressures were used to make them do their jobs are not part of that story. In fact, I can feel some sympathy for an engineer producing a work like that under duress, but I can find very little sympathy for someone doing that just for money.
Yes... military -- boring, military tech -- double plus cool. :-)
>>I lived in Poland before the fall of the wall for a while and it taught me a lot. For one it taught me how the people in a country like that are to some extent complicit by refusing to stand up for their fellow man when it matters.
I didn't live there, but those in the Eastern block knew what would happen if they stood up (e.g. Hungary, Czechoslovakia).
When it became clear there wouldn't be Soviet divisions rolling over the border if they stood up, then they threw out their Soviet puppet regimes in months.
Edit: OK, sorry for missing the point.
There always seem to be people willing to collaborate in return for favors.
Revolution is a different matter.
Russia is getting more and more democratic every day.
Soviet engineers are no longer afraid, because they either on tiny pension (those who haven't died), and after USSR decay nobody quite cared about new generation of engineers.
The military budget is second largest in the world (all things considered) but the amount of new weapons army gets is diminishing.
How is F-22 (360 mil $ per aircraft) going?
It is?
Wonderful! From the outside I had the impression it was going backwards with political control over media, etc.
(Not ironic, this is really good news for the world. I'd still like some links...)
It would have been interesting to see if that article could have been answered seriously.
(On the other hand, I have used that as a reference for a decade without seeing a good counter argument. It changed my world view, so I'm interested in seeing it discussed.)
He is right on a historic scale (development taking decades and presuming that transfer of know-how and tech sooner or later is to be followed by the ability to retain larger profits within the receiving nation).
But this is nothing original as a thought because ~150 years before him it was Marx who said that capitalism is better than the rural feudal economics, anyway, and explicitly acknowledged its productive power (Before dissecting his problems as a social order, in his understanding).
Anyway, this arm-chair observations hardly matter to the overworked and overstressed individual, or to the parents of those who commit suicide out of desperation.
Cheap labor manufacturing is better than the alternative of no cheap labor manufacturing -- and the first step on the ladder to a better/modern economy.
I don't like it, either. But afaik, there is no other way to start the road to a modern society (this also needs good governance, no conflicts, etc).
Obviously, if you had a better answer, you would have addressed the point.
Edit: Did I miss that you are arguing FOR something -- instead of just complaining that the first step out of poverty is just a few times better than the poverty?
I never said I liked, disliked, complained, or argued about anything, neither I felt there was a point to be addressed so to argue with you over something.
I've answered you what I think (after reading the article) just out of politeness - so get over it (if the answer doesn't match quite your opinion) and move on.
>>I've answered you what I think (after reading the article) just out of politeness
I assumed you had something to say about my reference/argument when you wrote. My fault of course, to assume that you did more than finger exercises.
I'll try to remember you and not assume that you have any content in your writing. 1/2 :-)
But you see the iPhone is an American product, so it's human costs somehow are excusable. These subs were the product of an enemy state, so they are not excusable.
I agree with Jacques, and I actually lived in the Soviet Union half my life.
> American things cost more is they can't just grab a scientist or engineer and say, "Build this for us, or else..."
Really? You think that's how these things were built. With soldiers holding engineers at gunpoint? I understand Western propaganda is of the highest quality but sheesh... I had no idea they had you brainwashed that well.
The truth is engineers who built these were very good engineers who got payed very well. It was a very prestigious profession to have. It came with a better apartment and other perks.
> but we should also mention the very real costs and atrocities they committed to get these projects done.
Please, spare us the propaganda. I am assuming you are American or British. What about their attrocities? Or let me guess, American bombs are only to kill "terrorists" and "enemy combatants" while their enemies' weapons conduct "atrocities". What about all the countries in South America, or Vietnam? Who helped commit those attrocities?
> "literally human blood, sweat, and tears"
There were a lot of engineers who would have love to shed some "blood, sweat, and tears" working on such a project. /Yes, I am beign sarcastic...
No but you have to look at the entire value chain. In the old Soviet Empire (call a spade a spade) conditions were often very poor for miners, farmers, etc. If those people had been paid a market rate for the raw materials and labour, and so on, at every stage in the value chain, then the cash bill at the end would have been much, much higher.
I don't doubt Russian engineers were very talented - we all saw that Russia produced great mathematicians, chess players, etc. But not so good as they could work miracles.
You could be writing about very large parts of the world today there, not just the USSR as it was.
And some of those parts would be closer to home than you may be comfortable with.
Yes but there was more equality than it is now in the west among the richest and the poor. Healthcare, education (all, even higher!), and apartments were provided by the state. Think how much you make vs how much you spend for you house ($500K / 30 years?). What about about your healthcare over you lifetime $5M? Or college education $100K? If you didn't have those expenses, you might get by with just $15K/yearsin some parts of the US. Yes all those things were of the lowest quality but they were _there_. The oppression and gulags were there too, I am not excusing them at all.
Then what are you saying? I'm finding it very hard to work out what your point is.
"The coercion of the state (such as it was) did not play a significant role in the final quality of these engineering works."
The point was that if food is cheap, and other stuff is provided, perhaps you don't have to pay your engineers $150K/year. If you can centralize all the education, housing and healthcare you can provide it cheaper for each person. Well of course , the system was broken and eventually fell appart.
But I was just highlighting that just because those particular engineers didn't make the equivalent dollar amount / year that US engineers made doesn't mean they had a proportionally lower standard of living, that is all.
I think the quality of the engineering is tremendously overblown. It's expressed in urban fables like the one about NASA spending millions on space pens while the Russians used pencils. Straight paste from Wikipedia -
In commission: December 12, 1981 Completed: 6 Active: 1 Scrapped: 3 Preserved: 2
There's an order of magnitude more Soviet diesel/electric subs sailing the world's oceans.
Yes, that's one that's been doing the rounds from before the web.
But it looks like the ISS will pretty soon be relying on Soyuz for its provisioning until Elon Musk will be in a position to provide an alternative for the shuttle flights.
And that's not a mere pen or pencil we're talking about, and it's not a fable.
That's 60's technology still in use today.
Well, we were talking about the Typhoons. A piece of megalomaniac, cripplingly expensive technology that mostly rusts in scrapyards. Also not a fable.
The cripplingly expensive is very apt, in that sense they did more for the Russian people than they did against their intended targets, it is believed that this sort of prestige project hastened the downfall of the USSR considerably and set the conditions for a more democratic form of government.
So in a way maybe it was good that those megalomaniacs did their typhoon project, I'm not sure how much longer they would have been able to hold out otherwise but less seems to be better.
With the specter of the USSR gone as archenemy #1 it seems we have now been duped in to being afraid of terrorists and the spending in the west meanwhile continues unabated.
I wonder if we (as in here in Western Europe, though I'm currently writing this from Romania) will ever have a 'typhoon' project.
I am reminded of the interview with Edsger W. Dijkstra on HN recently. http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/8/96632-an-interview-with... :
"""The OS/360 monitor idea would have never occurred to a European?
No, we were too poor to consider it and we also decided that we should try to structure our designs in such a way that we could keep things under our intellectual control. This was a major difference between European and American attitudes about programming."""
You are pulling that opinion out of thin air with 0 basis in fact. If you ask me, a bunch of pressure hulls put together in one outer hull is a lot more complicated than a single pressure hulls. That can only be cheaper/simplier becasue the cost of labor is so much lower. Welding the pressure hull is extremely expensive.
If you look at reliability, all 18 of the US Ohio class which were design/built starting in the 70s (while the Typhoon came out in the 80s) are still in operation and are slated to be replace in about 2020. None have had a catastrophic accident. They've had something like 130 succesful Trident practice launches in a row. There are a lot of signs that the US ones are the most reliable in the world.
Accidents of enormous magnitude have happened because of cheapness, the Russians did not have a monopoly on that.
> It's surprisingly easy to meet a budget in a totalitarian state...
That is true, but not because engineers are working in a Gulag. It is because of how a central-planning economy works.
Now of course you can argue that the whole country was one big Gulag and there is truth to that, but engineers working on these submarines probably were much, much better off than peasants in some corner of Siberia...
As for the oppression bit, the satellite states of the USSR were fairly ruthlessly kept in check, lots of very bad things happened there, more than we will probably ever know about and there are definitely examples of scientists that were forced to work on projects that they did not want to work on, such as Theremin.
I think that relatively to other professions, engineering was actually prestigious. I was on awe of my uncle and father who were engineers and wanted to be like them. American kids today want to either play professional sports, be lawyers, CEO, or doctors. In ex USSR engineering was a relatively good profession to have without having to necessarily be involved too much into the party politics.
The perks were no more coercieve than having health insurance tied to the job + mortgage payments in America.
> As for the oppression bit, the satellite states of the USSR were fairly ruthlessly kept in check, lots of very bad things happened there, more than we will probably ever know about and there are definitely examples of scientists that were forced to work on projects that they did not want to work on, such as Theremin.
That is true and that is a serious problem. We are yet to have the equivalent of Nuremberg trials for ex Soviet Union apartchiks and those who co-operated with them.
I am not excusing them on a absolute moral ground. On a relative moral ground, I would like Americans to stop thinking their empire is less coersive and repressive. It treated many countries around the world very brutally, it installed ruthless fascist dictators all through South America and Asia. They are still fighting wars in the Middle East and "brave" drone pilots in Langley, VA are risking their lives daily driving to work so they can play video-games and with a push of a joystick putton assasinate individual we'll never know or hear about in a country we are not even at war with...
So yes, I am for critisizing imperialism and oppression, but I am for doing so for all the imperialism and oppression not just the ones that the popular propaganda machine wants to critisize.
We're in agreement there.
> They are still fighting wars in the Middle East and "brave" drone pilots in Langley, VA are risking their lives daily driving to work so they can play video-games and with a push of a joystick putton assasinate individual we'll never know or hear about in a country we are not even at war with...
And that's a huge problem, and a very bad step to take. The bigger the distance between the opponents the bigger the chance of both fuck-ups and a de-humanizing effect.
> So yes, I am for critisizing imperialism and oppression, but I am for doing so for all the imperialism and oppression not just the ones that the popular propaganda machine wants to critisize.
Trying to get people to open their eyes to the faults of the country that they dearly love is a very uphill battle.
I understand that we love to paint everything in ex-Soviet Union with wide black brush stokes, but speaking from personal experience that is just inaccurate.
That did not include engineers only. It was true for everyone. But that doesn't mean people were crying on the streets and committing suicide.
Engineers that never participated or cared to participate in dissent or political activities didn't have it bad. No homes with 2 car garages but a decent standard of living. A good apartment, healthcare, 1+ month seaside resort vacation, health care, education for your children. All those thing were included.
> Did Soviet engineers and scientists enjoy a fairly reasonable standard of living? Many did. But the comparison to the US and health care is ludicrous on its face.
They had a significantly better health even if they became unemployed than someone in US would have if they became unemployed (which is none at all).
> But the comparison to the US and health care is ludicrous on its face.
Why is it ridiculous? I will take ex Soviet health care rather than no health care or healthcare that results in you having to sell your house and live on the streets. They had good doctors and stressed preventive care just as much as emergency care (which is the case in US nowadays for many who cannot afford health insurance).
You can bash the political system all you want. I am with you with that. But I don't think you know what you are talking about when it comes to other stuff.
If you don't mind me asking, have you lived there or are you just taking an wild guess?
> Did Soviet engineers and scientists enjoy a fairly reasonable standard of living? Many did.
I thought that is the whole point of this discussion thread...
You'd say that the days of having to misrepresent the situation 'on the other side' of the iron curtain were long over but it's far from that.
Let me try to give an outsiders perspective:
- crime:
- nearly non-existent, except when perpetrated by officials
- not quite as good as the top schools in the west for
many subjects but *very* good in some, such as math,
engineering and such
- non-existent. For everybody, no matter how low on the
totem pole there was a job, even if it meant bad pay
and long hours. But bad pay and long hours are to be
found in plenty of places, the USA and Canada are no
exception to this
- free. And of a reasonable standard. Ok, you wouldn't
be able to get some fancy surgery so your life
expectancy wasn't quite up to it from that point
of view, but on the whole I would say it was simpler,
more humane and in many ways better than some of the
more extreme cases in the west (Terri Schiavo anybody?)
- difficult to gauge. People that I knew when living in
the east block compared to the west before the fall
of the wall and the 'iron curtain' were on the whole
as happy or happier than those that I knew in the west.
Friendships were real and lasted a lifetime in many
cases, family ties were fairly closely knit and
children were on the whole loved and safe, much safer
than those 'free' children in the west. Again,
officials would occasionally mess things up for the
people but in this respect people did form a block.
- Even though the punishments were severe there was a
lively underground in the form of samizdat (sp?) and
'culture houses' were movies from the west were shown
to friends. And not just the Hollywood movies, also
those from other countries. So the people there had a
limited view of what was going on in the rest of the
world through the official channels, which mostly
read like 'good news' and 'motivational' stories.
(I recall one front page article about a girl
that had broken the record in nursing her kid or
something to that effect), it was seriously delayed
but between the drip feed of information from
travelers, radio free europe, the bbc world service
and a whole pile of other channels people were
remarkably well informed.
- about the same as in the west 25 years earlier. So
colour tv's were fairly common but so were b&w sets
relatively few people with a quality car, plenty
of two-strokes (trabant, wartburg, syrena, polonez
zil, dacia and other brands that you may have never
heard of) Plenty of stuff only available by waiting
for years, lots of stuff that you'd take for granted
in the west inexplicably unavailable, not unexceptional
for 'hamstering' behaviour of a few individuals to
cause shortages in for instance toilet paper, light
bulbs and stockings. Very lively black market. For the
most part people had fairly healthy food on the table,
but they were structurally short on things like fruit
and fresh vegetables out of season.
- your job is, unless you are a lucky person and you're
in some prestigious place probably terribly boring
tons of layers of bureaucracy slow everything down to
a crawl. Procuring the simplest of items required to
do your job require endless forms and always at least
three signatures and two stamps. Promotion is hardly
ever, and when it happens it tends to ignore your
proficiency in favor of someone with better connections.
On the whole the 'general workforce' takes work for
granted and produces enough to get by but stellar
performances are the exception. If you want to advance
there is a path, but it leads through the 'party', and
if you're good at something then doors can be opened
provided you dance to the tune. If you're in to sports
then you can go quite far too.
- there is a low-key paranoia that pervades society,
don't let you guard down in front of strangers,
you never know if they're taking names or informing.
Everybody knows somebody that knows somebody that
disappeared, but hardly anybody knows somebody that
disappeared (and why), but it definitely does happen.
That is what I miss. We used to spend more time together. It is not that we didn't work hard, we did, but there was just more time to spend with the family and friends. Then after the collapse for some reason people, even in my extended family, changed. They started hating each other more. There is less sencerity and closeness. It is hard to explain.
Interesting that you noticed that as well. I thought it only happened to my family....
I hope you find the picture on the whole accurate, it's from my no doubt faulty recollection, I hope I haven't romanticised or glossed over the bad parts. There are plenty more paragraphs that I could add about for instance the army, the jokes, the police, the drinking and so on, but I think it's enough like this.
Two points of comparison I can give:
(1) In America, members of my immediate family have political views that are in some way wacky or out of the mainstream, and we've never worried for a second about prison being a consequence.
(2) When we first came to America, we were literally on welfare and lived in a poor/ghetto neighborhood, until my parents learned enough English to get good jobs. Yet this was still a much higher standard of living than what we'd had in Poland, where both of my parents worked as engineers. Much larger apartment, more food, better clothes. No more ration cards for meat and chocolate. Stores that, instead of tiny and half-empty, are giant and piled high with goods. Oranges and bananas just lying around in stores as if they are everyday things, not rare exotic luxuries.
(3) On health care - there were many extremely well-trained and competent doctors in Poland. But availability of equipment and medicine was very extremely poor and hospitals were not well maintained by US standards. Also, medical knowledge among typical doctors, especially on rare diseases or chronic conditions, seemed far behind the US.
(4) I've been back to Poland a few times since the fall of communism. Conditions have very visibly and vastly improved. Apartments are still tiny, but there's plenty of stores piled with goods, bustling cafes and restaurants, and so forth. Construction going on everywhere. Cars are now mostly quality European, America, Japanese and Korean brands. No more Communist-era junkers. Poland now meets the usual European standard of fresh produce that is substantially better quality than what you can get in the typical US supermarket. Western media is everywhere. Many of the cities look quite lively and vibrant. The city that I think most bears the scars of past suffering is Warsaw - it was completely destroyed by the Nazis (particularly including any historic or cultural buildings) and rebuilt by the Communists. Check out the Palace of Culture and Science for another marvel of Soviet engineering: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Palace_of_Culture_and_Sc....
(5) In the US, where I work in the computer industry, I believe I have a higher standard of living overall than probably even the top party leaders in Communist-era Poland.
(6) Math and science education was quite good compared to the US, at the elementary and secondary level, but not at the college level. I think this is a European cultural thing, not a Communist thing, it remains true today, and is true in most European countries. American math & science education in elementary school and high school is a joke, excepting special magnet schools or AP classes.
(7) My impression is that the Communist era is somewhat more romanticized in Russia than in other former Eastern Bloc countries. Particularly the more Western-oriented countries like Poland, Czech and Hungary see that period as one of being imperialist vassal states.
Overall, there's no way, not even the slightest chance, that I'd trade the "free" health care and "non-existent" unemployment for the freedom and wealth of America, or even for the way Poland is now.
But if you think about Woz as "I inspired many to become engineers for engineering's sake" then you'd be surprised by sheer amount of engineering talent in eastern countries (I'm a central european myself) that got inspired by different tutors, mentors, tinkerers... Not to mention underfunded Soviet engineers that managed to build these wonderful machines of war - that could compete with US machinery.
AFAIK Engineering was always encouraged in east - It was "Liberal Arts" that were oppressed and eastern management stinks - even more than western does.
Yes, they had sharashkas up until 1953. There is no excuse for that, but implying that all engineering was done there is just ridiculuous. It is like saying everyone was stupid and any work that was done was just because someone put a gun to their head. That kind of a message is disingenuous at best and smells like propaganda at worse.
Nevermind the fact that Typhoon was commissioned 30 years later after sharashkas were closed. So it doesn't even apply to the article at hand.
However, if you are implying some kind of American moral superiority then look at how Americans used Nazi rocket engineers. Also, they appropriated and used most of the research done by the Japanese at Unit 731 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731. There were no Nuremberg trials for those (except some trials in Russia) and some of those working there ended up as heads of big pharma in Japan after the war.
You said engineers were not prisoners. This was not the case, and I provided a counterexample. That's all. I have no idea where you found anything in my post about American moral superiority. As for Soviet scientific progress, I also made no other points in my original post — but I will take the opportunity to do so now.
Yes, they had sharashkas up until 1953.
The Wikipedia article states that. Do you really believe that Khruschev, just because he chose to oust Stalin, gave up on such a convenient source of scientific labor? Keep in mind that history in the Soviet Union was always a complete fabrication dictated by the latest Party ideology. While I don't question that many forced labor camps closed, I seriously doubt that those closings were universal.
I would be willing to bet you that engineers working on the Typhoon class submarines were not prisoners. In general engineering was an esteemed and respected profession. Think lawyers and doctors in US. These are all general statement relating to the situation in Soviet Union based on a personal experience.
Your comment made it sound like "no, that is _wrong_ most engineers were prisoners".
That is just simply wrong. There we some engineers who were also prisoners. But most of them were not.
Those engineers that worked on building submarines were doing very well. That was a very prestigious job. Again think about someone being a stock broker or a corporate lawyer in US.
> The Wikipedia article states that. Do you really believe that Khruschev, just because he chose to oust Stalin, gave up on such a convenient source of scientific labor?
Alright the history of the Soviet Union might have been obscured and covered in secrets but you forgot one important thing -- the Soviet Union fell apart. It lasted only 70 years and people from the 50s are still alive. So no matter how much the Soviets tried to rewrite the history, as long as there are still millions of eye witnesses it is just not possible.
> I have no idea where you found anything in my post about American moral superiority.
You are right, you didn't say it. I put those words in your mouth because I thought you implied it. The reason I thought that is that your perception of the situation in the ex-Soviet Union, especially as far as the naval engineering goes, is completely wrong. Being that you refuse to admit that it is wrong, leads me to believe that you are just drumming up the same boring Cold War propaganda that we've heard before from the Americans -- stuff like "in Soviet Union everyone was in a Gulag", ... , "any progress was made just because people were prisoners and forced to work",... and so on.
I am not excusing or romanticizing the ex Soviet empire. I am glad it fell, I didn't like. I want to be able to write whatever crap I want online without the fear of someone knocking on my door and so on. BUT painting everything with a broad black brush is just wrong. Life in the Soviet Union was not hell, people were not crying on the streets, everyone had their basic needs taken care of, crime was law and so on. No matter how much we want to hate it, we cannot re-write that, because that as well would just as dishonest and wrong.
All the oppression and coercion in the world will not produce good engineering without competent engineers. The USSR, for all its faults, did produce some impressive weapons -- such as the T-34, Il-2 or AK-47.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUBSAFE
Look at the list of submarine accidents on Wikipedia, you'll notice the modern US ones are all boats driving into things (this happens more than youd think, the sonar is set on passive 99% of the time and under sea mountains don't make any noise) while the Russians have had some nasty accidents with fire extinguishers and torpedeos leading to mass casuality incidents.
I'm not sure exactly what this means but I have the image of them stuffing fire extinguishers into the torpedo tubes for the fun of it; only for it to all go horribly wrong.
The old Soviet defense design houses benefitted tremendously by being the follow-on developers. They could see what US defense contractors did, then figure out how to do it cheaper and more reliably.
That said, the Soviets have had an amazing record of comparable, cheaper, more rugged, more reliable dating from World War II. Where a US cargo plane requires infrastructure, a comparable Soviet cargo plane would be able to land on unpaved airfields and include a manually operated fuel-pump. Where German designers would require over 20 parts for some doo-dad in an artillery piece, the US equipment would accomplish the same functionality in about 3/4ths of the parts, but the Soviets would undercut them by another 3 or 4 parts.
James Dunnigan discusses this in his classic _How to Make War_.
Being the follow-on competitor is actually a great way to avoid overengineering.
From WWII through the late 70s this strategy served the USSR quite well, but by the 80s their "cheap and simple" approach was leaving them further and further behind. At the low-end of the performance and design spectrum this left them with some very nice tools, but the high-end was owned by the west and in the early to mid 80s an inflection point seems to have been passed where high-end units could completely dominate a particular battlefield.
I suspect there's at least one valuable analogy applicable to startups here.
They aren't always the inferior that cold-war propaganda has claimed.
I like final photo: http://pics.livejournal.com/igor113/pic/001e72eq
Translation (not exactly direct, but keeping close):
Submariner!
Relieved yourself?
Clean up after yourself!
And kindly requested,
Close the door
of the head.
People live in this section
(Violators will be severely punished!)
I was a submarine officer in the US Navy and we would never allow any boat to look like this; literally rusting all over the place. That said, holy st the Russians built huge boats.
The rockets they were designed to carry are no longer in production either, so the whole class should be slashed by the end of the decade.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_%28rocket_family%29
Still going strong after 40+ and its first launch due from ESA's spaceport in Q4 2010:
"Typhoon class submarines feature multiple pressure hulls that simplify internal design while making the vessel much wider than a normal submarine. In the main body of the sub, two Delta class pressure hulls lie parallel with a third, smaller pressure hull above them (which protrudes just below the sail), and two other pressure hulls for torpedoes and steering gear."
The same happens happens with the names of towns and of people all over wikipedia so it's no surprise to see it happen with the names of classes of submarines.
Nevertheless, it turns out that land based ICBMs can also be made highly survivable so even given this any US/USSR exchange of nuclear weapons would have been devastating to both sides, regardless of how many subs survived.