There's nothing racist about recognizing nations for their strengths. The reason some nationalities are better at some things is because their culture emphasiz

There's nothing racist about recognizing nations for their strengths. The reason some nationalities are better at some things is because their culture emphasizes it. US culture has traditionally been anti-intellectual and emphasizes sports, making money, etc. Really smart people in the US tend to avoid government work (because the pay is not as good and the bureaucracy stifling) and go to work in Silicon Valley or in a different field altogether like medicine or finance. In the USSR, mathematics and physics were strongly promoted by the government, so of course they did really well there. Smart engineers went to work making weapons and such because it was probably prestigious, and since all the industry was state-owned, there was no advantage in staying out of it like there is in the US. Why did the SU fail? Simple: the things that make a society good at producing leading physicists aren't necessarily the same things that result in a robust economy. Worse, spending most of your GNP on your military tends not to result in a strong economy either; just look at North Korea. The US spends a lot on its military too, but nothing like what the Soviet Union did, as a percentage of national output.