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.

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.

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...)

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.

http://www.slate.com/id/1918

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 :-)

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.

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."""

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.

Accidents of enormous magnitude have happened because of cheapness, the Russians did not have a monopoly on that.