I guess the US just wanted the best materials.
Here's a good primer on industrial titanium (see chapter 3):
"Titanium: Past, Present, and Future" from National Academies Press, 1983
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/1712/titanium-past...
In 1948, based on the Bureau's work, E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company built and started production in the world's first titanium sponge production facility. The first commercial titanium from du Pont was melted and processed to sheet by Rem-Cru Titanium and then sold for experimental use to Republic Aviation for the Thunderjet and to North American Aviation for the Sabrejet. Also in 1948, 200 industrial, technical, government, and military leaders met in a Navy-sponsored conference and the titanium industry was off to an enthusiastic start with aircraft designers excited and planning early applications. By 1953, annual production was 2 million pounds, and the Douglas DC-7 flew with titanium nacelles and firewalls. Demand and production grew rapidly. To the aircraft and titanium industries it was euphoria, the first heady upswing in the production curve (Figure 1).
... [by 1958] Military strategy shifted from dependence on manned aircraft to emphasis on missiles, and military demand (then the life-blood of the titanium industry) dropped dramatically and, consequently, so did titanium production and sponge prices.
... The U.S. titanium industry has suffered from these periodic reversals. In the 1950s it was the world leader in both technical know-how and quantitative production but now has lost its early worldwide lead to the Soviet Union and Japan although it continues to meet most domestic titanium needs.
So in the early 1960s it sounds like the US actually had more than adequate titanium production capacity. Why use Soviet titanium instead of domestic for the SR-71? Were they trying to conceal the construction of a new titanium aircraft line from domestic titanium suppliers or other domestic parties?
TFA says that "The US worked through Third World countries and fake companies and finally was able to ship the ore to the US"
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/1712/chapter/5
Titanium ore reserves are abundant and widely distributed throughout the world (Figures 7 and 8). U.S. self-sufficiency has declined from 75 percent in the mid-1960s to 45 percent in 1980 because of the ready availability of low-cost concentrates from other countries rather than from a lack of U.S. reserves. In terms of contained titanium, the manufacture of titanium dioxide (TiO2) in the United States is about 15 times greater than the production of titanium metal. An emergency need for additional raw material for metal manufacturing could be met readily by diversion of ore, or of titanium tetrachloride, from the TiO2 industry. Ore cost, about $0.35 per pound of contained titanium, is a minor part of the price of titanium metal.
Titanium ore is not rare, expensive, or difficult to find domestically. Producers of titanium minerals listed later in the report include the United States, Canada, Finland, Norway, South Africa, India, the Soviet Union, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka. Canadian and Norwegian production are higher than US production. Soviet production is lower than Norway, Canada, or the US.
This report was published 20 years after the SR-71 started flying, but titanium minerals were never rare and they have long been produced in the United States and in closely allied countries. So I still wonder if there is something to explain "The US worked through Third World countries and fake companies and finally was able to ship the ore to the US" or if it's just a story.
To me it reads a bit like a story about how the US tricked the USSR into shipping lead ores to the American small arms industry during the Cold War by saying that deer season was coming up [1]. It sounds clever and funny. But it doesn't make a lot of inherent sense that the US sector would need to clandestinely obtain a common mineral resource from its rival. The very fact that it is good as a story makes me want to understand more before accepting it, because good stories have a way of propagating themselves regardless of their relationship with the truth.
[1] Note: I have never heard this story about lead ores. I just made it up on the spot as an example of a story that sounds so good that I would be inherently disinclined to believe it without further evidence.
Ilmenite is named after the Ilmenski mountains in Russia where the mineral was first discovered in relatively free abundance, the other principle source for titanium is rutile sands .. typically volume access to rich old sand layers requires strip logging of large areas of old growth forest to then remove acres of overburden to then hoover up a band of sands.
Circa late 1950s if you wanted large volumes of high grade ore your choices were pretty much Russia and ..., err, Russia.
( That or subsidising mineral exploration at scale and developing other sources .. which did happen but over a longer timescale .. meanwhile the first flight of the SR-71 was in 1964 )
There's more on the mining apects at the Geoscience Australia page:
https://www.ga.gov.au/education/classroom-resources/minerals...
And it was way worse back then given it was a field being actively developed.
Not to mention the development and characterisation of titanium grades and alloys, and their treatment (heat and solution).
According to the wiki, at some points Lockheed has to reject 80% of the titanium they got due to metallurgical contamination, and they had to rebuild tooling and processes because of corrosion issues with chlorine (from tap water) and cadmium (from tools plating).
If they’re useless, how are they making chips and secret tech?
> If they’re useless, how are they making chips and secret tech?
My reading is they are trying to make us useless but we are not there yet? I assume it takes time, right?
In any case, not like the west can complain after what we did in the opium wars?
Thank god we have such a huge military defense budget for preventing them from stealing our PDFs. I swear to god, if they steal one more PDF I am going to flip out. I hate the chinamen, and China is our greatest threat as a species.
They are 2nd in GDP, and I wish they were 3rd. What devious tricks will they pull next?
the west isn't one entity.
Plus two wrongs don't make a right. Just because in the past, there has been atrocities committed, doesn't mean there's justification to do so now.
Even just consider that the hegemon that leads the west has changed from great Britain to the US.
What makes you think so
Some sort of moral balance has to be achieved before two forces can move forward. It will feel reasonable to both sides when it happens.
Some country might feel that they're justified in what they're doing, because another country previously have done it (and got to a dominant position, perhaps, by doing it). But generally, i dont think this justification is sound, and is an excuse, rather than a real justification. Now of course no country require justification to do what they wish - that is the meaning of having sovereignty, but this also means that other countries must actively stop this sort of practise.
I can quote quite a few cases from history where this kind of thinking has led to the worst kind of atrocities. Especially when one side wants to satisfy a resentment that has been built up over decades or centuries.
Including virtually every major case of genocide from the 20th century that I can think of.
> Some sort of moral balance has to be achieved before two forces can move forward. It will feel reasonable to both sides when it happens.
While, I can think of cases where this would apply when the restoration of balance happens directly after the offense (such as actions taken against Germany and Japan from 1944-1950).
However I wouldn't be able to come up with a single example of such "restoration of balance" successfully happening 100+ years after the initial offense in a way that was seen as reasonable by both sides after.
Would the relationship between Germany and Israel be restored if Israel nuked Berlin, killing 5 million people?
Maybe you can provide your examples?
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12gw8w/what_...
Can US blame China for another two hundred years for Pearl Harbor because both China and Japan are the East?
The duration between the last US-UK war and Opium wars is much shorter than the Opium wars and the present. During this time, US helped China by opening up its market asymmetrically and being on its side during WW2 and even gave China aid.
> President Roosevelt approved $25 million in military aid to China on 19 December 1940, permitting the Chinese to purchase one hundred P 40 pursuit aircraft. By late spring 1941, the United States had also earmarked over $145 million in lend-lease funds for China to acquire both ground and air equipment.
https://www.history.army.mil/brochures/72-38/72-38.htm#:~:te....
The aid continues even now: https://www.usaid.gov/china
That is quite a non sequitur. Who is being forced to take drugs or listen to extremist propaganda? Those are deliberate choices made by people with low impulse control, and China has nothing to do with that.
The instability of American culture is currently seen as an intrinsic virtue. China is not causing any change. They're just apparently exploiting what was already the dumbest part of America. Even America's allies do this. If America finally grows up it would be a good thing and the only way that will probably happen is more self-inflicted disaster.
https://www.jordanharbinger.com/sam-cooper-how-the-west-was-...
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/30/us/california-police-unio...
Then again, I don't care if someone thinks that a reference to a communist party is negative, as long as the negativity is about the communism aspect (as opposed to the ethnicity or general culture of that country). Just like I don't care if the NSDAP would find it insulting if I call their party the Nazi party.
Also in your link is a reference to the official CCP website, where they themselves (or so the talk page claims) state while they prefer CPC, CCP is also acceptable.
So it seems to me that this is a nothing-burger, where some activists are fighting on behalf of a group that doesn't really see the reference as a slur in the first place.
Based on this link, CCP was even the original abbreviation, which was changed to CPC as late as 1943 due to pressure from Comintern/Stalin:
https://chinamediaproject.org/2023/03/30/ccp-or-cpc-a-china-...
In almost every single case, those using these drugs are trying to escape the physical and/or emotional pain. They didn't wake up one day and say "I want to have fun, I'm going to do heroin"
Almost every fentanyl user I've talked to in harm reduction work started out on prescribed painkillers. Whether they got the taste and moved up quick, or just couldn't get their fix and couldn't deal with the horrible weeks of withdrawal and found a place to get it, they didn't just up and start shooting fentanyl one day.
1: https://drugabusestatistics.org/prescription-drug-abuse-stat...
As opposed to the non-pharmacy filled prescriptions people pick up?
Your argument is that the statistic only works because so many people don't pick up meds their doctor calls in for them?
I'm not a statistician so maybe I'm not understanding correctly, but that seems like a very weak argument.
Tell that to historians, especially Chinese historians, regarding Britain’s opium trade.
Also important to note it wasn't the Opium in Opium War that led to the century of humiliation - the humiliation was due to the War that weakened the Qing mandate and economic consequences of the unequal treaties. Great Britain via gunboat diplomacy forced Qing to open trade to opium that Qing tried to ban domestically by seizing stocks from British merchants. The shame/damage wasn't having citizens tripped up on drugs and the social ills that entail, but loss of sovereignty/state capacity over economic affairs that drained silver reserves and reversing trade surplus, which had knock on consequences. Wasn't addicts that brought down Qing, but the throne being weakened due to loss of sovereignty and inability to put down multiple uprisings due to loss of treasure. PRC waging opium war on US comparison only works if PRC was militarily coercing the US to not enforce domestic drug policies. As if that can happen. Does PRC propaganda benefit from US inability to curtail drug use domestically? Yes. But not enough to not cooperate with the US on drug trade when the relationship was good.
Things can be similar even if they're not identical. If a state actor supports criminal forces to transport harmful substances into a country, it's not so different from supporting the East India Company in doing so.
Also, the purpose matters. When the EIC sold opium in China, the motive was probably profit. If China sponsors sale of opioids in the US, it's more likely to be motivated by a desire to cause harm, which most would consider worse.
> Does PRC propaganda benefit from US inability to curtail drug use domestically? Yes. But not enough to not cooperate with the US on drug trade when the relationship was good.
Well, this implies that you agree that the main purpose is not their own gain, but the harm they can inflict on their perceived rival.
What would it look like if the US developed the same kind of desire to inflict pain and suffering in China, as a goal in itself?
Besides, the US drug epidemic predates PRC/fentanyl for decades. PRC is fine with reaping benefits of US dysfunction on the sidelines - most of the world and their politicians get propaganda value from mocking dysfunctional US drug policy. America the Great not being able to control drug use within their borders is an quintessential American problem through and through. Again being indifferent schadenfreude =/= supporting. PRC hasn't even unscheduled fentanyl yet, a legal drug previously scheduled at US request. If PRC was actively malicious, they would go back to skipping Mexico/LATAM as middle man and coordinate at state level to swamp the US directly at scale.
IMO the main benefit of poor US drug enforcement for PRC is MSS (PRC intelligence) being able to exploit opportunity to coordinate with LATAM based PRC triads to build out intelligence networks and influence. Their primary business is money laundering, largely for PRC capital flight. It doesn’t matter who actually provides the drugs/precursor (India/Mexican producers are in the game as well), or if it even needs to be drug trade in the first place.
>inflict pain and suffering in China, as a goal in itself
If US wants to reverse fentanyl trade into PRC they can go ahead. PRC state capacity is much better at dealing with domestic drug trafficking - like many other Asian countries. Otherwise the US has been trying to infiltrate PRC civil society to ideologically undermine CCP for decades despite PRC protest. PRC's ultimately decided to crack down domestically - see western NGO closures, eradicating CIA spy network, or HK protests. Something is uniquely dysfunctional with the US approach when PRC can fight ideas/influence better than the US can fight drug trafficking.
Not only this is counterproductive, it would be definitely something those hypothetical Chinese agents would say! This sentiment is what you call "the dumbest part of America" - one of personal responsibility when facing dangers that are by design above most people's threshold of self-control. If there is one thing that's likely to destabilize and destroy the western society, it's marketing and advertising industry - it's your own companies that rely on and encourage people blaming failures on themselves, because it lets them use psychological tricks to move wares.
Also:
> Who is being forced to (...) listen to extremist propaganda?
These days, everyone consuming the Internet and western mass media? There are (at least) two extremes in the US politics and culture, and while listening to one may be a choice, it's partly because the other extreme won the meme spreading battle.
Not criticizing or anything, but actual extremes look significantly different, wake me up when a proper anarchist sits in White house for example
Proper left wing extremists were the RAF who murdered people they fought against. Protestors are not extremists.
Genuine question: I purposely don’t spend any time on social media or any other blog/forum that makes use of Internet “memes” so I’m blissfully unaware of what kind of content is circulated. Also, as (another) European, I try to not let myself be overly distracted by American political drama. I need to have some awareness of what’s going on in the US as it influences the political discourse in the rest of the Anglosphere (Hacker News posts like this one suffice for that level of awareness).
... I hope you're not in charge of anyone's life
So just like what the British empire did to China during the century of humiliation with opium? Mainlander hypocrisy is comical
Do you feel the same about he Opium Wars?
The US is tearing itself from the inside because of the inevitable conclusions of late stage capitalism: there is an unsustainable wealth gap, and entrenched systemic discrimination perpetuated by cultish religiosity.
Blaming China for this (or even Russia) is silly. The US is doing it to themselves. It's a Strong Link culture (vs the rest of the West which optimized for Weak Link). So it's still the best place in the world to go from nothing to riches, and stay rich.
But as a society it doesn't seem like it's salvageable without another civil war.
But it hasn't experienced a lot of the same cultural changes that it's most significant allies have gone through. Why not? There's a number of other reasons: The Strong Link culture (ie optimize for the STRONGEST members of your society rather than the weakest) that is somewhat unique. The fact that it wasn't destroyed in WW2 is another (Though neither were Canada or Australia). The fact that it felt like it was "The Leader of The Free World" for the last 80 years (and therefore had no reason to introspect).
But I think the core of the disagreements within the US between the Left and the Right come down to easily 40-50% of the country fundamentally believes that there is a magical man in the sky who will reward them from being good (for a fairly regressive perception of good) with infinite blissful life after death. And this is what they fall back to when it comes to justifying white supremacy (in every extreme), the discrimination of the LGBTQ, immigrants, etc.
Before you get to any other matters of policy or values, this is a fairly fundamental hurdle to get past. You either believe in a magical sky monster based on faith, and consider this to be more important than anything else you might do in your finite earthly life, or you...don't. And Americans DO at a rate more than most.
Everything else flows from this. How can you even conceive of getting on the same page of what a sensible tax policy, an introspection of the culture of police, the segregation of the cities, or the crumbling education system when you can't get past a fundamental belief.
So the systems prevail. The GDP grows. And just like wars stimulate scientific progress, so does the knowledge that if you fail you will wind up dead in a ditch, inspires some great entrepreneurship and ideas. A lot of which continue to change the world.
Then people on this website and others wonder why the same parts of the country generating the highest GDP also have the most human misery on the streets. It's because it's the other side of the same coin.
Given that the religion of the US is individualism, of might-makes-right, of look-out-for-number-one, I'm not sure you can blame this on the belief of existence of God.
Indeed the -actions- of many religious Americans seems completely at odds with the tenants of their pronounced beliefs. They elected a thrice-married, self-confessed sexual-predator as president, and would like to do so again. They are anti welfare, pro gun, pro white,and so on.
By contrast, those "heathen" European states have care for the sick, care for the poor, respect for society as central pillars. They are countries (very imperfectly) following religious ideals while not having particularly religious people.
Personally I think American Christianity is an embarrassment to Christians elsewhere. Their disconect between professed beliefs, and actions is the very hypocrisy Christians are often accused of.
In the US religion and politics are tied together, which is unfortunate. There are plenty of religious Democrats, and plenty of non-hypocritical Republicans, but their voices are drowned by those with political intentions.
But make no mistake, the primary religion in the US, as evidenced by actions (not words) is money.
Those who do behave like this are obviously not the ones we hear the most noise from.
What we're dealing with is some other phenomenon which has labeled itself as "Religious" but doesn't believe in the core philosophy. People can see the value of being part of the "religion club" or "religion tribe" and realise straight away that they only have to pay lip-service to its values or that they can argue their way from the values to what they want to do with a bit of sophistry.
Hence the Spanish Inqisition, Cusades, Holy Wars, Terrorism, Subjugation of native populations, religious racists and so on.
”When asked about such tragedies Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn explained, “Men have forgotten God, that’s why all this happened.” Another preeminent Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoyevsky explained, “If God is not, everything is permitted.”
> there is a magical man in the sky who will reward them from being good
You might want to look up Jihad.
Communism is definitely a religion as the Catholic Church has claimed for more than a century. It's an atheistic religion. It's a religion created by atheists, celebrated by atheists and defended by atheists. It comes with its own prophets and prophecies, sacred items, soteriology, hierotopy, pseudo-spirituality, pseudo-morality, pilgrimages, temples, theophany, soteriology, cultic practices, sacred texts and exegetical commentary.
Quaaludes have been effectively nonexistent globally (with the sole exception of South Africa) since the start of the 1990s and entirely because of the "War On Drugs".
The reality is that the user base shifted to MDMA based products and other options such as valium or xanax. Quaaludes aren't as enjoyable because they can easily knock you out before you have any real fun..
I don’t see heroin going anywhere despite the war on drugs.
Xi has said that China was a great nation until the First Opium War, which he blames for plunging China into darkness until the Party took control. Though he will never say it out loud, in his mind, he might be running that same playbook in reverse on the West. http://gh.china-embassy.gov.cn/eng/sgxw/202107/t20210704_906...
It was a war about power and sovereignty. Losing those is bad. It's only related to opium because the inciting incident was British worry over an opium law.
Neither I nor Xi made that claim.
China told the British to stop selling opium because it was damaging China's economy (by extracting silver, which Chinese taxes were denominated in), making more Chinese turn to drugs, creating a virtuous cycle for British East India Company and other drug traders. The British refused because they wanted Chinese tea but were unwilling to pay in silver, which was the only payment China would accept because China didn't want British goods, so the British used military power to establish British-owned ports to import opium for silver (using some of it to buy all the tea the British could drink) and dictate Chinese trade policy.
Without the opium trade, none of this would have happened. China likewise doesn't care what the US thinks about fentanyl damaging the US economy, with the total damage estimated at 7% of GDP in 2020. https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/democrats/issue-...
2. China is still actively doing it
https://www.brookings.edu/testimonies/chinas-role-in-the-fen...
That's actually what is happening... people who are already addicted to other drugs are losing access to those drugs (or realizing that fenty is cheaper) and then switching to it.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/fentanyl-...
"At first, she started using meth, then later added heroin. But about six months ago, she couldn’t find it, she said. Fentanyl was the only choice.
“I held out as long as I could,” Winter said."
This actually happened to China: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
Weird that we in the west are now projecting about it, especially when our own pharmaceuticals companies are doing so much of the damage.
That was an atrocity then, and if China is returning the favor, it's an atrocity now.
> especially when our own pharmaceuticals companies are doing so much of the damage.
There are probably quite a few people in those companies, or among corrupt doctors and politicians taking their bribes, that belong in prison.
contrast this with the current drop in Chinese economic output due to sanctions
Putting all those things together I would guess that they could not get enough titanium without getting it from the USSR, and that they would have had to use a front company in any event as they had not publicly acknowledged the aircraft’s development.
No, they don't. If they did, it'd probably be a felony to share them.
The specifics of the operation, including the names of the dummy corporations used or how the scheme was precisely carried out, have not been declassified.
The amount of titanium actually acquired is unknown too. The US was producing a significant amount of titanium at the time and for all we know, Ben Rich was privy to very limited information about its provenance that he then extrapolated for the sake of narrative.
I read the 2013 release a few years ago and recall that I found it quite entertaining, but I don't remember any specific quotes or factoids about the consideration of alternative sources.
I'm curious if you have any citations for that. If I google it, your guess is the top result.
In The Rock (1996), the Red Sea Trading Company is the name of a shell corporation used to launder proceeds from illegal arms sales. Wonder if the writers put it in there as some kind of nod.
Not saying that these articles are specifically ChatGPT or other primitive generative tool but it is a journalist stupidity and/or copy/pasting/generative.
The SR-71 needed a specific grade of titanium, something of extreme purity. Only the USSR sold that purity with regularity, I believe what I read said something like 90%+ of what they bought from other suppliers had to be discarded
They never mention that the #1 worldwide producer of titanium is Australia. They never mention that South Africa produces a lot as well. They rarely mention the name of the shell company. (Red Sea something?) They don't talk about whether alternatives were considered.
I just feel like there's probably an interesting story there, but we never hear it, just the tidbit that can fit in the headline.