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.
Well, we were talking about the Typhoons. A piece of megalomaniac, cripplingly expensive technology that mostly rusts in scrapyards. Also not a fable.