On Wed, 11 Jun 2008 19:17:13 -0400, Ed Huntress wrote:

It's no wonder that they drove themselves into the ground. They had some
excellent engineering and materials science and they were capable of
making fine products of various kinds. But only in small numbers and at
a very high cost. They spent all of that capability on military goods
and they had no productive capacity left to make anything else, except
with horrible inefficiency and equally horrible quality. That's why they
collapsed.

There was no concept of real cost of things in the Soviet Union. I have a
nice story about that. Russian had a sophisticated weapons program, and
as part of that had huge isotope separation plants located near their
hydroelectric power dams in Siberia, which produced pure isotopic
elements at zero perceived cost. These are sometimes important; for
instance, pure isotopic diamond has heat conductivity multiple times that
of regular diamond, which in itself is a record-breaking heat conductor.

Some scientists in my old department needed a pure isotope of cadmium.
Free market price of what he needed was in tens of thousands of dollars
per gram, but he heard about some Russians in their Academy of Sciences
having a stock. He took some measuring equipment (an oscilloscope or a
boxcar averaging voltmeter, or something like that), and went to Moscow
to barter with the cadmium guy. The Russian pulled out an enormous chunk,
worth possibly millions, from his drawer, and grabbed a pair of scissors
(cadmium is about as hard as lead). A horse-trading session ensued where
our guy and the Russian kept moving the cut line until they settled on a
fair-sized chunk. There was a lot of samples over many years that got
made out of that cadmium, back in the seventies.


--
Przemek Klosowski, Ph.D. przemek.klosowski at gmail