The Soviet Union’s Nuclear Icebreakers
asianometry.substack.com
asianometry.substack.com
I want to see when that admission was made, and how someone got them to admit it. It was the most surprising part of the article for me.
Wouldn't it be great to see more defense spending introspection and honesty.
I wonder if there were any missions where a foreign spy satellite was captured inspected in orbit then sent on it's way?
My best guess for the continuing air force interest in a shuttle like platform (the x-37) is for exactly this reason. not bombs but satellite capture.
edit, I actually read the posted message. The requirement was for a once around then land. so consider my question unasked. Salutes
Surprisingly, the first result from the search returns [0]
[0] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/28243/could-space-...
The military purposes for the Shuttle were primarily servicing and refuelling the KH-11 satellites and launching other NRO payloads that couldn't ride a normal launcher.
The cargo bay and cross-range landing performance specifications were derived from those mission requirements.
From the Soviet point of view the Space Shuttles were the largest and fastest first strike nuclear bombers ever created. With enough of them in orbit you just obsoleted all other nuclear delivery methods.
Just because something pretends to be a civilian craft doesn't mean it can't be repurposed into a military one in no time at all.
I can't think of any major problems that the US government solved since the USSR collapsed. Maybe a little competition at the international level is needed.
The US has demonstrated that it no longer takes threats of MAD seriously and we'll destabilize any country that doesn't fall in line. Look to the obvious situation with Russia and continued pressure to sanction and damage the Chinese economy.
The only way I see this unipolar situation reversing is if someone actually lets some nukes fly
How is Russia invading Ukraine, and many countries, including the US, supporting the righteous Ukrainian defence effort any different than what happened during the Cold War in Vietnam, Afghanistan, a bunch of civil wars? MAD is still at play. If it were not, there'd be NATO troops at least from Poland helping defend Ukraine against the Russian agression.
And yes, Russia deserves punishment for it's brutal invasion of a neutral country with genocidal methods. Sanctions are the only possibility that doesn't result in nukes flying today, but sanctions it is. Every time a dictator's land grab wasn't responded to, but appeased, they just came back for more (Hitler, Stalin, Putin, Saddam Hussein).
China is a third world country and Russia is making itself into one.
Third world countries in the in the 1960 had life expectancy on the order of 35 years. The USSR twice that at 67. Colonialism was not a picnic for the people colonialised.
And to remind, much of USSR was (and much of Russia still is) colonized people. That, too, translated to rather big differences between the central European part of Russia and, say, Turkmenistan.
“The United States Cannot Afford to Lag Behind Russia”: Making the Case for an American Nuclear Icebreaker, 1957-1961
https://www.cnrs-scrn.org/northern_mariner/vol31/tnm_31_31-6...
Its not surprising Eisenhower vetoed it. He vetoed 39 bills in 1958 alone.
Can you tell me why this isn't surprising? What about Eisenhower and his vetoing bills in great numbers?
Many people believe that because he vetoed so many bills, it allowed his administration to run a surplus in three of his eight years in office.
This would be darkly amusing at the moment. Funding hardware to beat Russia isn’t as hard as it used to be.
https://www.navalgazing.net/Merchant-Ships-Icebreakers#fn1_3
The US has many warm-water ports; Their nuclear-powered ships already had to handle that. The Soviets had a single warm-water port and they'd have no need to base their nuclear icebreakers there, so they likely went with a simpler, cheaper design - "дешево и топорно".
Note that cruises to the North Pole for tourists (mostly Western ones) were a regular thing before the war and sanctions.
Upd. Actually, cruises to North Pole continue. This video features a recent one, with a lot of high school and college students: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7b8QMcGfsvY (the author talks too much, but the video is packed with info)
https://yle.fi/news/3-12648960
Ironic that trade continued through decades of the often very tense cold war.
Chernobyl was not less safe than other designs of its time. It could be safer for sure.
Russia operates multiple nuclear reactors. They are fine so far.
Huh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Hahn_(ship)
> In 1972, after four years of operation, her reactor was refuelled. She had covered 250,000 nautical miles (463,000 km) on 22 kilograms of uranium.
Considering these icebreakers are probably not very well guarded this is a very good decision for nonproliferation purposes.
Back to the only enriched to 5%, it would still make a good dirty bomb. But probably very unhealthy and impractical to assemble for the 'target audience' interested in such things.
Edit: So it says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK-150_reactor , three of them. Each using 150.7kg U235 enriched to 90%.
[*edit] If you're downvoting I suggest you read about the waves of purges of engineers[1][2][3] that continued well after the Stalinist purges. Moreover in this context we're talking about a ship powered with a nuclear reactor, and it's well known that Soviet reactor designs were stolen from the West[4] in the early days. Also it's a joke, lighten up.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrecking_(Soviet_Union)
[2] https://www.egr.msu.edu/~amezqui3/personal/extracts/the_gula...
[3] https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resista...
No doubt, absent the stalinist purges and closing off of the USSR, then Soviet scientists could have equally participated in the science and engineering going on in the rest of the world.
Soviet rocketry was demonstratively, intentionally, in-your-face domestic, those low ranked Peenemunde engineers were sent home as soon as they helped to build R-1 which was a verbatim copy of V-2 indeed (US got much more from Nazis, namely the best engineers and actual V-2s and equipment and tech). For example practicaly everything in R-7, maybe except for the vague idea of the hydrogen peroxide gas generator to drive the turbopump, was novel at the time. In particular the control system, telemetry, aerodynamic modeling, material science, and both types of the hot separation mechanism. That was entirely intentional.
What they got from Nazis more or less verbatim, was namely radars (later improved on and perfected) and electronic measurement equipment tech. Not nuclear weapons (part of the tech was later stolen by Fuchs and other commie sympathizers from US, but was used to control the scientists results, not directly as a base, so it didn't speed anything up). And especially not nuclear power tech.
And submarines, the Type XXI German design, by far the most advanced of it's time, served as the basis of multiple Soviet submarine classes (which they quickly outgrew).
> to the front, the GULAG, or to a wall
Right, but still, after Stalin's death, USSR had a renaissance of sorts - art, science, tech, quality of life improvements across the board. Still not enough to win the Cold War - was likely impossible - but enough to maintain for some time the lead in some areas and be not terribly outpaced in most others. Unfortunately, effects (and conditions) of Khrushchev Thaw could hardly be repeated, and until Gorbachev the country leadership wasn't allowing enough of progress.
One of the points of the article, I believe, is to remind that USSR had their own achievements.
What do you mean? They didn't have world-class scientists? They didn't compete in thermonuclear weapon race, with test of their own design (Sloika)? They didn't built world first nuclear power plant for the grid in Obninsk? They didn't participate in particles research, e.g. with invention of Tokamak? Did they steal all of that? Or you're just saying that whatever they did, early on they used most important data from spying? Learning from others, and spying for your adversaries both predate USSR by millenniums.
> And the all of it was fueled by grain stolen from Ukraine
You mean, different part of the same country specialized in different activities? Which grain was stolen - and by whom - from Ukraine (you mean, Ukrainian SSR?) when nuclear research was going on, mostly after WWII?
The did in fact have some, of course it was a huge place, but the theft of nuclear secrets is well documented, as are other episodes of industrial tech. In fact the Mitrokhin Archives[1] revealed that industrial espionage was one of the primary purposes of Soviet spying. For example in 1971 Agent TONDA gave the KBG two volumes of documents on micro electronic components developed in Tokyo for US aerospace use.
> Which grain was stolen - and by whom - from Ukraine (you mean, Ukrainian SSR?)
I'm referring of course to The Holodomor[2] which was executed at gun point and overseen by Moscow via the NKVD. The whole thing was used by Stalin to clear our rebellious Ukrainians and to fund industrialization.
What I'm saying is that a lot of touted Soviet achievements were built on a foundation of theft, slavery, and ethnic cleansing unrivaled since WWII.
> So you're condemning USSR as a whole, not just in the scope of this discussion?
Yes. I'm am 100% fully condemning the whole USSR for its full history. The purges, the Holodomor, forced relocations, anti-Jewish programs, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, all of it. The USSR condemned racism in the US while at the same time running an ethnic cleansing program across its whole land mass so massive and pitiless that it would have made an SS officer blush. They condemned colonialism and yet ran South Yemen as a colony until 1990. The evil didn't stop with Stalin, the repression just became a little more graceful.
In fact major names that westerners might know went exactly through that system (Mikoyan and Guryevich actually had a period that was euphemistically referred as "fell out of favour for bad results on MiG-1 fighter"), and slowly relocated back to various locations in the timeframe between end of WW2 and Stalin's death.
And do you know what Mikoyan & Guryevich design bureau did while in GULAG? Spent years building high performance planes that were pushing what was possible for propeller planes, which ultimately got them ready to get back in the high-end fighter design as jet era started.
This is so hilariously untrue I’ve never even seen anyone make this claim before. Tens of thousands of engineers are known to have died digging canals with their bare hands.
Sure some folks like Mikoyan got lucky, but forcing scientists into slave labor is hardly an accomplishment to be proud of.
It’s also well documented that tons of intellectuals and engineers(broadly speaking) got wrapped up in the Stalinist purges. Writing the charge of “wrecking” into law was a real thing. The deaths of untold numbers of wreckers on the White Sea Canal is no exaggeration. The tyrant of the quota system was very real.
The RBMK being based on Chicago-Pile-1 is well known. The way in which the USSR acquired the atomic bomb is also well documented.
I’d go on to say that any time this topic comes up, a number of Soviet apologists show up. There are actually some fairly prominent members of the community that are unapologetically Stalinists, not many but surprisingly some. It’s still worth rebutting IMHO.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_computing_technology_...
And the reason I mentioned the "euphemism" is that they got really lucky - other teams also went through the same system, but for example Yakovlev OKB wasn't censured, whereas MiG OKB probably avoided digging canals only because MiG-3 cleaned some of the bad reputation they got from MiG-1 and for a time both were the major planes for certain categories of air war available in USSR (high altitude intercepts).
That your defense is to say that many scientists in the middle of the century in the USSR were merely doing science in slave colonies is telling.
Have a generation of engineers who weren't held back by white haired out of touch fossils. There should be a maximum age for engineers, scientists, and technicians because in the west they are strangling all innovation in academia.
What a bizarre defense of the purges and show trials...
And well anyway, that's not what they did. They placed party officials and "friendly" workers in charge of scientists and engineers and shipped them off to camps if they expressed ideas unfriendly to the party. For a good decade everyone researching plant genetics stopped doing science or ended up in prison[1]. For years they didn't innovate really at all. In the early days they leaned on foreign specialists[2].
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrialization_in_the_Sovie...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Vavilov
> Vavilov's work was criticized by Trofim Lysenko, whose anti-Mendelian concepts of plant biology had won favor with Joseph Stalin. As a result, Vavilov was arrested and subsequently sentenced to death in July 1941. Although his sentence was commuted to twenty years' imprisonment, he died in prison in 1943. According to Lyubov Brezhneva, he was thrown to his death into a pit of lime in the prison yard.
If the Soviet Union had excellent higher education, why was/is Communism and then corruption/organized crime an issue? At what point do phds, engineers, etc take responsibility for the society in which they live? When do the smart people say "we have met the enemy and he is us?" [1]
0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnHdqPBrtH8
1. https://library.osu.edu/site/40stories/2020/01/05/we-have-met-the-enemy/
In 1986, the Soviet Union had slightly more than 10,000 computers. The Americans had 1.3 million.
At the time of Stalin's death, the Soviet Union was the world's third most proficient computing power. But by the 1960s, the US-Soviet computing gap was already years long. Twenty years later, the gap was undeniable and basically permanent.
Why did this happen? The Soviet state believed in science and industrial modernization. Support for research & development and the hard sciences were plentiful. They had the country’s finest minds.
Goodness gracious, they launched Sputnik! They landed on Venus! How did it come to this?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_computing_technology_...
Radar theft: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1985/09/24/s...
Entire books were written on the subject. Here’s one: https://www.csmonitor.com/1984/1126/112610.html
Reminds me of China today.
“ Mueller, operating since 1974, is said by US officials to have set up some 41 dummy firms in Europe and Africa solely for the purpose of facilitating the diversion of sensitive US high tech.
He is the technobandit said to be behind the now-famous attempted VAX computer diversion last year from South Africa to the Soviet Union via West Germany and Sweden.
The diversion trail, as outlined by the authors, demonstrates the lengths to which determined smugglers may go to attempt to avoid detection.
According to the authors, the sensitive computers were transferred from one of Mueller's South African firms, Microelectronics Research Institute (MRI) to another of his South African firms, Optronix. The computers were then resold to a Swiss firm, Integrated Time AG. The Swiss firm was a subsidiary of Mueller's German firm, Deutsche Integrated Time. In the meantime, the computers had been loaded on a ship bound for Sweden and the Soviet Union.
The VAX computers in question had originally been legally licensed for export by the US government to MRI in South Africa, but under the condition that they not be resold or transhipped elsewhere.”
They weren't compensated fairly for their work during the soviet union either.
Are you sure about that?
No. But I'm curious what you're suggesting. The article mentions that the last 2 were built by the Fins. The rest appear to have been Russian-made. Are you suggesting the Russians didn't build any? Or... well... I'm not sure what you're getting at.
Ukraine was the second most populous (accounting for 18 percent of the population whole Russia accounted for 51 percent) and contained a lot of the manufacturing plants. It looks like these particular ships were built in Russia (although I don't know where engineers grew up or what their ethnicity was or if they might have hesitated to identify with Russia) but for instance the head of the Soviet space program Korolev was Ukranian (sort of he was born in Ukraine with Ukranian, Russian, Belarusian, etc ancestry and I've seen claims that he claimed both Russian and Ukranian ethnicity/nationality at different times) also take the flagship Moskva that Ukraine sank that was built in Ukraine as well as the recently memed Soviet Treasure Island (which was made by a studio in Kyiv). Often the west identifies something made in the Soviet Union as Russian even if it's not or if it's more complex to assign it to a modern country. Also part of the way that people think about identity of people like Korolev is based on Russia's and Putin's attempt to rehabilitate the atrocities and weaponize nostalgia about the few good bits. Korolev was sent to the Gulag due to fake accusations, some say he died due to physical injuries from that time preventing quick medical treatment.