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Soviet Union sold titanium to US believing they needed it for pizza ovens

244 points by jerryjerryjerry 3y ago

duxup 3y ago
Considering a pizza oven doesn’t require titanium… that’s a strange cover story.
- blihp 3y ago
  They didn't know that at the time. Not an outrageous story as hotter is generally better for pizza ovens.
  - duxup 3y ago
    > They didn't know that at the time. Hard to imagine they even tried to find out as the lie would quickly become obvious with just a little effort.
    - epmos 3y ago
      Rutile is used in refractory bricks and the import was of the ore mineral. So not completely unbelievable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutile#Application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutile#Application
      - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
        There was no shortage of TiO₂ in the US. It's used everywhere. They were specifically importing the refined metal because the soviets had the only viable production capacity.
        cantrevealname 3y ago
        > There was no shortage of TiO₂ in the US. But the article says that the US lacked the ore: “Back when they were building the airplane the United States didn’t have the ore supplies – an ore called rutile ore. It’s a very sandy soil and it’s only found in very few parts of the world.” Also, the Wikipedia link above doesn’t show the US to be major producer. It does show ex-Soviet block countries to be major producers. I mean, you might be right about importing the metal rather than ore. I’m commenting only about whether the ore is widely available in the US.
        CraigRo 3y ago
        There's plenty of titanium in the us. They opened a mine in the Adirondacks just for this purpose in WW2, and there's tons of untapped ore. Chances are that it was cheaper to get from the USSR than to make it ourselves
        c_o_n_v_e_x 3y ago
        This is the case for many materials. The raw material itself is not rare, the bottleneck is the refining/processing capability and thus the refined material is scarce. - The shortage of lumber in US a few years was due to lack of saw mills, not trees - Shortage of semi-conductor grade Neon due to lack of plants that can refine the gas to the required purity - Shortages of oil derived products due to constraints on refining - "Rare earth" shortages as few countries refine. China is one of the few countries willing to tolerate the pollution generated from the refining processes.
  - varjag 3y ago
    You don't quite need 1500C or so Ti alloys can tolerate to bake a pizza.
- satiric 3y ago
  Forget wood fired pizza, titanium fired pizza has a way better flavor. I wonder if they really used the pizza alibi for all the titanium or if they diversified. Did they really put all their eggs in one basket?
  - taf2 3y ago
    Can’t wait for the YouTube video about this - should be a good DIY series
  - Bluestrike2 3y ago
    They used multiple front companies and routed orders through third-world countries to buy the needed ore. More than likely, pizza ovens--or more likely, I'm guessing unspecified parts for pizza ovens--were just one of many cover stories used by those companies, and at least some of them were probably more believable than pizza ovens. You wouldn't use the same cover story for all the companies making the purchased. Plus, titanium dioxide is used as a pigment, which would have reasonably explained a great deal of the rutile ore they purchased.
- atomicnumber3 3y ago
  The capitalists are decadent bourgeois pigs, who could fathom the whims of their lifestyles? (this is a joke)
  - klyrs 3y ago
    I swear to you, there is an untapped market for titanium pizza ovens. Maybe for camping gear. Maybe for stationary ovens. But fire + titanium + father's day? It practically sells itself. Titanium pizza peels are already on the market. Who needs this shit?
- dylan604 3y ago
  We told the Iranians we were making a space opera movie called Argo, and needed to scout locations as a cover story to get out the embassy employees. Strange is what makes a cover story good!
- j16sdiz 3y ago
  Yes. This is just another generated content farm.
msla 3y ago
So you're saying those uranium-powered baby monitors probably aren't on the up-and-up?
8note 3y ago
> After all, they fraudulently possibly told their comrades that the United States was a lazy country that probably couldn’t even cook for itself. They need it to go out to buy pizza… This is a weird dig at the soviets, who were probs just happy to to find some customers to justify having already dug up all the ore. The fraudster seem to be the Americans in this case?
- varjag 3y ago
  Fun fact, pizza was virtually unknown in USSR throughout its existence.
  - cpursley 3y ago
    What you could get was Georgian-style khachapuri which is an amazing cheesy butter bread thing. Now there’s a Dodo pizza in every city and pizza-sushi-etc places on every corner.
    - varjag 3y ago
      Khachapuri was certainly known but hardly could be ordered anywhere outside few large cities or Georgian SSR. Most people who knew about it have never tasted it (as is still the case with me).
      - EA-3167 3y ago
        You should fix that never tasting it thing, it's so worth it. Just make sure to eat it when you can afford to have a nice nap afterward, it's that filling and rich.
        varjag 3y ago
        Oh absolutely. It's on my contingency TODO list.
        epicureanideal 3y ago
YLYvYkHeB2NRNT 3y ago
when is OK to trust a liar?
tedunangst 3y ago
But why would a pilot be privy to the materials sourcing operations?
- dharmab 3y ago
  This information has been declassified for decades, much longer than the quote from the pilot. I first read about it in Ben Rich's memoir, published 1996.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
This is due a miscommunication. The SR-71 was originally developed for rapid pizza delivery(this was when companies took their pledge, “It’s hot or it’s free” seriously). It could deliver hot pizza to any point in the continental US rapidly allowing there to be full coverage with only a few actual pizza baking locations. Unfortunately, the Air Force saw the potential military implications and repurposed it.
- Hikikomori 3y ago
  The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta. Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a role model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it -- talking trade balances here -- once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity -- y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else: * music * movies * microcode (software) * high-speed pizza delivery The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator's report card would say: "Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills." So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved -- but no cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.
ezzaf 3y ago
Perhaps a more accurate headline would have been this buried deeper in the article "The US worked through Third World countries and fake companies and finally was able to ship the ore to the US to build the SR-71." And to complete the loop, Russia is now importing sanctioned American microchips for its missiles via third parties. I wonder if the order form states they will be used in smart pizzas ovens.
- missedthecue 3y ago
  80% of the world's silicon and magnesium comes from Russia/China. US can't make the stealth coating on the F-35 without it. Can't control where the big bang placed mineral deposits... *Technically silicon is everywhere but until the US and EU are willing to rip up their riverbeds to get at it, it's as good as nonexistent there.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    I would word that differently. Different sources of sand are good for different things. River sand is very good for concrete, which cares almost entirely about shape and not chemistry. If your goal is silicon you're usually looking elsewhere.
  - pkaye 3y ago
    The purest silicon for semiconductor wafers comes from Spruce Pine, North Carolina. https://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/made-on-earth/how-the-chip-changed-everything/ https://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/made-on-earth/how-the-chi...
  - bigger_inside 3y ago
    the * is the important part. Little to do with the big bang, much more to do with where we export environmentally disastrous mining operations to. The countries the West destroyed by (among many other things) putting the mines there now (at least that) reap a dividend in leash power. Good for them.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  > And to complete the loop, Russia is now importing sanctioned American microchips for its missiles via third parties. I think they were doing exactly that back then too. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
codedokode 3y ago
USSR should have supplied a weakened metal that would be only good for pizza ovens.
- drivebycomment 3y ago
  This is about obtaining the titanium atoms - i.e. raw ore, not alloy. Even if it were about alloy, it wouldn't have matter that much what alloy Soviet provided, as long as it contained enough fraction of titanium in it that US could refine. US wouldn't have bought it if it didn't contain enough titanium, thus this comment is nonsensical.
akira2501 3y ago
The US "intelligence" apparatus created a particular cover story. There's no actual information as to what the USSR actually believed at the time. If they weren't particularly interesting in competing in aerial surveillance then it may have been seen as worth the money they got in return. They were already in the business of exporting it, it's not as if we got them to create a special market based on this cockamamie story. It does make great propaganda for the supposed capabilities of the CIA, though.
- tedunangst 3y ago
  Saying "SR-71" is like a cheat code that completely inverts HN's skepticism to 100% credulity.
  - basilgohar 3y ago
    Almost every thing about the 60+ year old SR-71 Blackbird still seems like something out of the future...except for the leaking fuel while not flying part. It's as close to a real deus ex machina as we can get, and it captures geeks' imaginations as such in ways like you describe.
    - masklinn 3y ago
      Even the stuff that’s resolutely from the past is really cool, like the foldable (hinged) signposts they installed along the hauling route between Burbank and Area 51: https://roadrunnersinternationale.com/transporting_the_a-12.html https://roadrunnersinternationale.com/transporting_the_a-12....
- relativ575 3y ago
  > If they weren't particularly interesting in competing in aerial surveillance then it may have been seen as worth the money they got in return. You really bend it to fit your narrative. Not sure what the Soviets believed, but no sane country would want to help their adversaries to achieve stronger offensive capabilities, which surveillance would no doubt help. Bribery though, that wouldn't be too outrageous. I don't see why CIA want to hide that fact though. Bribery along with blackmailing are common spying tools.
nimbius 3y ago
One has to wonder if or how this ever paid off. Once the sr71 showed up the USSR not only met the challenge with the Mig 25 foxbat a few years later, but outproduced the sr 71 to create strong coverage over most of Russia's airspace. Alone it couldn't catch the 71, but its r33 missiles and 600 kilowatt radar could If you owned a 71 it was probably a pretty bitter realization a plane less than half the price could shoot it down regardless of how much clandestine titanium you imported. And after the U2 incident it was probably a pretty loathesome proposal to send it over Russian airspace at all. The mig 31 basically retired it.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  Could a Foxbat shoot down an SR-71? The latter is like 0.6 Mach faster. The former was built out of steel, had an underpowered radar, couldn’t climb as high as a Blackbird and carried AA-6’s, which would have to lock and hit their target before the solid motors ran out [1]. To my knowledge the MiG-25’s claim to fame is shooting down an F-15 in the Gulf War. In any case, it’s clearly been worth it. The B-2, B-21 and RQ-180, to say nothing of our (sc)ramjet research derives directly from the Blackbird. [1] https://www.historynet.com/mig-25/ https://www.historynet.com/mig-25/
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    > Could a Foxbat shoot down an SR-71? If it were in the right place at the right time (e.g. already in the air and in front of it so the SR71 comes to them..) Not impossible, but extremely circumstantial.
  - nradov 3y ago
    While it would have taken some luck for a MiG-25 or SAM to shoot down an SR-71, for the most part the US Air Force didn't take the chance. Only a few of the early missions actually penetrated Soviet or Warsaw Pact airspace. For the most part they flew along the edges of international airspace and used sensors to look in. They did overly some other countries with lesser air defense systems.
  - Tool_of_Society 3y ago
phaedrus441 3y ago
Highly recommend the recent Acquired podcast episode about Lockheed Martin. They spend a while discussing the development of the SR-71 (and other Skunk Works projects): https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/lockheed-martin https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/lockheed-martin
nwallin 3y ago
Does any know any more details about this? It's a fun tidbit that gets a link/article on social media every few weeks, but it's never anything more than a tidbit. "The US needed titanium for the SR-71. The only supplier of titanium was the Soviet Union. So the US bought it from the Soviet Union through a shell corporation." But that's it. It's those 3 facts and only those three facts expressed in anywhere between one sentence and 10 paragraphs. 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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- dylan604 3y ago
  The public never hears about our successes, only our failures.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- tokai 3y ago
  As I understand it Soviet material science was ahead of everyone when it came to titanium alloys in the 60s. Both in the compositions of alloys and in the production of alloys with precise heat treatment. I guess the US just wanted the best materials.
  - numpad0 3y ago
    The problem isn’t that the story is suspicious, but that only the cached thumbnail version is around, and we can’t make out the letters on the mug.
- philipkglass 3y ago
  There is something garbled or simply wrong about this story. The US was the first country to produce metallic titanium on an industrial scale. It has more than adequate domestic ores. Titanium is one of the most common metals in the earth's crust; only the conversion from ore to metal is difficult. 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-present-and-future 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?
fy20 3y ago
Factories in the USSR often had a shortage of parts, but they still had to meet production quotas. This usually meant a reduction in quality, but it goes the other way too. I've heard stories that consumer appliance factories would run out of stainless steel, so they would use titanium alloy instead, as it was more plentiful. In my country, one of the most unique consumer appliances they made was a potato grating machine. Today the same device continues to made, unchanged since Soviet times.
- smcl 3y ago
  Is Titanium not famously quite hard to work with? I imagine that it would be hard to sub in for stainless steel, so for normal white goods I don't know if it'd be worth it.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - int_19h 3y ago
    FWIW, for a while (before the war in Ukraine), VSMPO-Avisma, the largest titanium extractor and exporter in Russia, was selling stuff like titanium gardening shovels, rakes etc on Amazon and eBay.
    - smcl 3y ago
      Ahh so maybe the expensive or difficult titanium work is the really high-end stuff like SR-71? I just recall from Skunk Works that they had a tough time working with it.
      - int_19h 3y ago
        It's definitely harder to work, but I suspect that once they invest into the appropriate tooling (for military products where it has to be titanium), it's easy and relatively cheap to repurpose for other products.
LispSporks22 3y ago
Sounds like one of those oft repeated, memorable bullshit stories like the NASA space pen. Does the book site sources?
- auxym 3y ago
  It's mentioned at least in Skunk Works, which is a first hand account from a Lockheed engineer that worked alongside Kelly Johnson during SR71 development. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/101438.Skunk_Works https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/101438.Skunk_Works
  - smcl 3y ago
    It's a good read, but I always wondered how much is embellished. I don't know if the pizza ovens anecdote being present there confirms its authenticity, it could be that Ben Rich had just heard about it through the grapevine or even that this book was how the story got spread in the first place.
  - cm277 3y ago
    This; also, the more interesting tidbit is that the US at that point hadnt really developed anything with titanium (for the same reason; most of it was in the USSR) so Lockheed had to develop all the tooling for the SR-71 internally as well, just to be able to work with it --regular steel tools simply couldn't handle titanium. +1 on the "Skunk Works" book just for the stories...
mmmBacon 3y ago
As a kid I was totally obsessed with this plane. As cheesy as it sounds the movie The Right Stuff served as inspiration. I wanted to become someone to fly it. I must have built this model at different scales 15 different times and devoured everything I could learn about the SR-71. Unfortunately I graduated from high school in 1991 and the peace dividend was in full effect. I also found out in college later that my eyesight and color blindness wouldn’t qualify me to fly. So I studied physics instead. As a professional engineer with 30 years of experience it continues to awe me that they were able to build such a machine in 1964.
readthenotes1 3y ago
Was this AI generated? The amount of repeat text is concerning if from a hunan
- JDEW 3y ago
  I was thinking the same. > ...they fraudulently possibly told their comrades... > ...by flying to the heavens. These sentences, among others, strike me as odd/unnatural, but I'm not a native speaker.
j16sdiz 3y ago
Ugh. Another content farm to block.
analog31 3y ago
What puzzles me is that I think titanium dioxide was already widely used as a pigment for paint in the 1950s, which would make me think it was widely available here.
- dharmab 3y ago
  Simply, titanium dioxide and aerospace grade titanium alloys are not the same thing at all.
  - analog31 3y ago
    True, but the article said they were not importing refined titanium alloys. They were importing ore, specifically rutile, which is what TiO2 pigment is made from.
    - dharmab 3y ago
      That part of the article is wrong- I just opened my copy of Ben Rich's memoirs and it says they needed alloy, not ore. Apparently their US supplier had insufficient quantities.
      - analog31 3y ago
        Ah, that would explain it. ;-)
MichaelMoser123 3y ago
They were also quite good at processing Titanium, for example the monument to Yuri Gagarin in Moscow is made out of a Titanium alloy (the monument looks like superman, if you ask me). They had to melt and cast titanium ingots in a vacuum oven, then assemble the components into the statue. This technique wasn't repeated very often, as far as i know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_Yuri_Gagarin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_Yuri_Gagarin Also see the Russian wikipedia article for a better picture of the monument: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%B0%D0%BC%D1%8F%D1%82%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BA_%D0%93%D0%B0%D0%B3%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%83_(%D0%9C%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B2%D0%B0) https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%B0%D0%BC%D1%8F%D1%82...
- thriftwy 3y ago
  I believe I had a Soviet stove in my early childhood whose burners were made out of titanium, at least they were super light like made from plastic.
  - SergeAx 3y ago
    It probably was silumin, silicon-aluminium alloy.
- sofixa 3y ago
  > They were also quite good at processing Titanium Yep, and they had a revolutionary (arguably too early for it's time) submarine, Project 705 Lira NATO codename Alfa, that used a titanium hull and a lead-bismuth cooled fast reactor, making it significantly faster than US submarines and even faster than US torpedoes, scaring the US in the process (who bought the propaganda that this sub will be the backbone of the Soviet attack submarine fleet, instead of just a proof of concept that did work, but was expensive and hard to maintain and thus scrapped).
- SergeAx 3y ago
  There is a much more large-scale monument opened almost 20 years before, used rocket-grade titanium as an external cladding: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_Conquerors_of_Space https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_Conquerors_o...
ww520 3y ago
The Soviets once gave Pepsi a number of its naval ships as payment for Pepsi Cola, making Pepsi one of the biggest navies in the world at the time.
JR1427 3y ago
I doubt any real trickery was involved. The Russians who sold the US the ore wouldn't have cared where the money came from. The US did them a favour by making an effort to disguise who the real buyer was, so the ore sellers wouldn't get in to trouble.
andrew_b0 3y ago
2023 Sanctions blocked exports from the Russian Federation for a wide range of products. This is not about the CP71, but if we look at the simplest personal aircraft, the paramotor, then almost 100% of their titanium frames are produced by 2-3 companies from Russia. There are a huge number of assembly brands around the world, but they all use Russian titanium frames. Russian aircraft engines (RMZ500) account for 80% of sales in the two-seat paratrike segment. In every passenger Boeing and Airbus you will find titanium and magnesium parts produced in the Russian Federation.

duxup 3y ago

Considering a pizza oven doesn’t require titanium… that’s a strange cover story.

blihp 3y ago
They didn't know that at the time. Not an outrageous story as hotter is generally better for pizza ovens.
- duxup 3y ago
  > They didn't know that at the time. Hard to imagine they even tried to find out as the lie would quickly become obvious with just a little effort.
  - epmos 3y ago
    Rutile is used in refractory bricks and the import was of the ore mineral. So not completely unbelievable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutile#Application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutile#Application
    - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
      There was no shortage of TiO₂ in the US. It's used everywhere. They were specifically importing the refined metal because the soviets had the only viable production capacity.
      - cantrevealname 3y ago
        > There was no shortage of TiO₂ in the US. But the article says that the US lacked the ore: “Back when they were building the airplane the United States didn’t have the ore supplies – an ore called rutile ore. It’s a very sandy soil and it’s only found in very few parts of the world.” Also, the Wikipedia link above doesn’t show the US to be major producer. It does show ex-Soviet block countries to be major producers. I mean, you might be right about importing the metal rather than ore. I’m commenting only about whether the ore is widely available in the US.
        CraigRo 3y ago
        There's plenty of titanium in the us. They opened a mine in the Adirondacks just for this purpose in WW2, and there's tons of untapped ore. Chances are that it was cheaper to get from the USSR than to make it ourselves
      - c_o_n_v_e_x 3y ago
        This is the case for many materials. The raw material itself is not rare, the bottleneck is the refining/processing capability and thus the refined material is scarce. - The shortage of lumber in US a few years was due to lack of saw mills, not trees - Shortage of semi-conductor grade Neon due to lack of plants that can refine the gas to the required purity - Shortages of oil derived products due to constraints on refining - "Rare earth" shortages as few countries refine. China is one of the few countries willing to tolerate the pollution generated from the refining processes.
- varjag 3y ago
  You don't quite need 1500C or so Ti alloys can tolerate to bake a pizza.
satiric 3y ago
Forget wood fired pizza, titanium fired pizza has a way better flavor. I wonder if they really used the pizza alibi for all the titanium or if they diversified. Did they really put all their eggs in one basket?
- taf2 3y ago
  Can’t wait for the YouTube video about this - should be a good DIY series
- Bluestrike2 3y ago
  They used multiple front companies and routed orders through third-world countries to buy the needed ore. More than likely, pizza ovens--or more likely, I'm guessing unspecified parts for pizza ovens--were just one of many cover stories used by those companies, and at least some of them were probably more believable than pizza ovens. You wouldn't use the same cover story for all the companies making the purchased. Plus, titanium dioxide is used as a pigment, which would have reasonably explained a great deal of the rutile ore they purchased.
atomicnumber3 3y ago
The capitalists are decadent bourgeois pigs, who could fathom the whims of their lifestyles? (this is a joke)
- klyrs 3y ago
  I swear to you, there is an untapped market for titanium pizza ovens. Maybe for camping gear. Maybe for stationary ovens. But fire + titanium + father's day? It practically sells itself. Titanium pizza peels are already on the market. Who needs this shit?
dylan604 3y ago
We told the Iranians we were making a space opera movie called Argo, and needed to scout locations as a cover story to get out the embassy employees. Strange is what makes a cover story good!
j16sdiz 3y ago
Yes. This is just another generated content farm.

msla 3y ago

So you're saying those uranium-powered baby monitors probably aren't on the up-and-up?

8note 3y ago

> After all, they fraudulently possibly told their comrades that the United States was a lazy country that probably couldn’t even cook for itself. They need it to go out to buy pizza… This is a weird dig at the soviets, who were probs just happy to to find some customers to justify having already dug up all the ore. The fraudster seem to be the Americans in this case?

varjag 3y ago
Fun fact, pizza was virtually unknown in USSR throughout its existence.
- cpursley 3y ago
  What you could get was Georgian-style khachapuri which is an amazing cheesy butter bread thing. Now there’s a Dodo pizza in every city and pizza-sushi-etc places on every corner.
  - varjag 3y ago
    Khachapuri was certainly known but hardly could be ordered anywhere outside few large cities or Georgian SSR. Most people who knew about it have never tasted it (as is still the case with me).
    - EA-3167 3y ago
      You should fix that never tasting it thing, it's so worth it. Just make sure to eat it when you can afford to have a nice nap afterward, it's that filling and rich.
      - varjag 3y ago
        Oh absolutely. It's on my contingency TODO list.
        epicureanideal 3y ago

YLYvYkHeB2NRNT 3y ago

when is OK to trust a liar?

tedunangst 3y ago

But why would a pilot be privy to the materials sourcing operations?

dharmab 3y ago
This information has been declassified for decades, much longer than the quote from the pilot. I first read about it in Ben Rich's memoir, published 1996.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

This is due a miscommunication. The SR-71 was originally developed for rapid pizza delivery(this was when companies took their pledge, “It’s hot or it’s free” seriously). It could deliver hot pizza to any point in the continental US rapidly allowing there to be full coverage with only a few actual pizza baking locations. Unfortunately, the Air Force saw the potential military implications and repurposed it.

Hikikomori 3y ago
The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta. Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a role model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it -- talking trade balances here -- once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity -- y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else: * music * movies * microcode (software) * high-speed pizza delivery The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator's report card would say: "Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills." So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved -- but no cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.

ezzaf 3y ago

Perhaps a more accurate headline would have been this buried deeper in the article "The US worked through Third World countries and fake companies and finally was able to ship the ore to the US to build the SR-71." And to complete the loop, Russia is now importing sanctioned American microchips for its missiles via third parties. I wonder if the order form states they will be used in smart pizzas ovens.

missedthecue 3y ago
80% of the world's silicon and magnesium comes from Russia/China. US can't make the stealth coating on the F-35 without it. Can't control where the big bang placed mineral deposits... *Technically silicon is everywhere but until the US and EU are willing to rip up their riverbeds to get at it, it's as good as nonexistent there.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  I would word that differently. Different sources of sand are good for different things. River sand is very good for concrete, which cares almost entirely about shape and not chemistry. If your goal is silicon you're usually looking elsewhere.
- pkaye 3y ago
  The purest silicon for semiconductor wafers comes from Spruce Pine, North Carolina. https://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/made-on-earth/how-the-chip-changed-everything/ https://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/made-on-earth/how-the-chi...
- bigger_inside 3y ago
  the * is the important part. Little to do with the big bang, much more to do with where we export environmentally disastrous mining operations to. The countries the West destroyed by (among many other things) putting the mines there now (at least that) reap a dividend in leash power. Good for them.
mcpackieh 3y ago
> And to complete the loop, Russia is now importing sanctioned American microchips for its missiles via third parties. I think they were doing exactly that back then too. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

codedokode 3y ago

USSR should have supplied a weakened metal that would be only good for pizza ovens.

drivebycomment 3y ago
This is about obtaining the titanium atoms - i.e. raw ore, not alloy. Even if it were about alloy, it wouldn't have matter that much what alloy Soviet provided, as long as it contained enough fraction of titanium in it that US could refine. US wouldn't have bought it if it didn't contain enough titanium, thus this comment is nonsensical.

akira2501 3y ago

The US "intelligence" apparatus created a particular cover story. There's no actual information as to what the USSR actually believed at the time. If they weren't particularly interesting in competing in aerial surveillance then it may have been seen as worth the money they got in return. They were already in the business of exporting it, it's not as if we got them to create a special market based on this cockamamie story. It does make great propaganda for the supposed capabilities of the CIA, though.

tedunangst 3y ago
Saying "SR-71" is like a cheat code that completely inverts HN's skepticism to 100% credulity.
- basilgohar 3y ago
  Almost every thing about the 60+ year old SR-71 Blackbird still seems like something out of the future...except for the leaking fuel while not flying part. It's as close to a real deus ex machina as we can get, and it captures geeks' imaginations as such in ways like you describe.
  - masklinn 3y ago
    Even the stuff that’s resolutely from the past is really cool, like the foldable (hinged) signposts they installed along the hauling route between Burbank and Area 51: https://roadrunnersinternationale.com/transporting_the_a-12.html https://roadrunnersinternationale.com/transporting_the_a-12....
relativ575 3y ago
> If they weren't particularly interesting in competing in aerial surveillance then it may have been seen as worth the money they got in return. You really bend it to fit your narrative. Not sure what the Soviets believed, but no sane country would want to help their adversaries to achieve stronger offensive capabilities, which surveillance would no doubt help. Bribery though, that wouldn't be too outrageous. I don't see why CIA want to hide that fact though. Bribery along with blackmailing are common spying tools.

nimbius 3y ago

One has to wonder if or how this ever paid off. Once the sr71 showed up the USSR not only met the challenge with the Mig 25 foxbat a few years later, but outproduced the sr 71 to create strong coverage over most of Russia's airspace. Alone it couldn't catch the 71, but its r33 missiles and 600 kilowatt radar could If you owned a 71 it was probably a pretty bitter realization a plane less than half the price could shoot it down regardless of how much clandestine titanium you imported. And after the U2 incident it was probably a pretty loathesome proposal to send it over Russian airspace at all. The mig 31 basically retired it.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
Could a Foxbat shoot down an SR-71? The latter is like 0.6 Mach faster. The former was built out of steel, had an underpowered radar, couldn’t climb as high as a Blackbird and carried AA-6’s, which would have to lock and hit their target before the solid motors ran out [1]. To my knowledge the MiG-25’s claim to fame is shooting down an F-15 in the Gulf War. In any case, it’s clearly been worth it. The B-2, B-21 and RQ-180, to say nothing of our (sc)ramjet research derives directly from the Blackbird. [1] https://www.historynet.com/mig-25/ https://www.historynet.com/mig-25/
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  > Could a Foxbat shoot down an SR-71? If it were in the right place at the right time (e.g. already in the air and in front of it so the SR71 comes to them..) Not impossible, but extremely circumstantial.
- nradov 3y ago
  While it would have taken some luck for a MiG-25 or SAM to shoot down an SR-71, for the most part the US Air Force didn't take the chance. Only a few of the early missions actually penetrated Soviet or Warsaw Pact airspace. For the most part they flew along the edges of international airspace and used sensors to look in. They did overly some other countries with lesser air defense systems.
- Tool_of_Society 3y ago

phaedrus441 3y ago

Highly recommend the recent Acquired podcast episode about Lockheed Martin. They spend a while discussing the development of the SR-71 (and other Skunk Works projects): https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/lockheed-martin https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/lockheed-martin

nwallin 3y ago

Does any know any more details about this? It's a fun tidbit that gets a link/article on social media every few weeks, but it's never anything more than a tidbit. "The US needed titanium for the SR-71. The only supplier of titanium was the Soviet Union. So the US bought it from the Soviet Union through a shell corporation." But that's it. It's those 3 facts and only those three facts expressed in anywhere between one sentence and 10 paragraphs. 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.

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dylan604 3y ago
The public never hears about our successes, only our failures.
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tokai 3y ago
As I understand it Soviet material science was ahead of everyone when it came to titanium alloys in the 60s. Both in the compositions of alloys and in the production of alloys with precise heat treatment. I guess the US just wanted the best materials.
- numpad0 3y ago
  The problem isn’t that the story is suspicious, but that only the cached thumbnail version is around, and we can’t make out the letters on the mug.
philipkglass 3y ago
There is something garbled or simply wrong about this story. The US was the first country to produce metallic titanium on an industrial scale. It has more than adequate domestic ores. Titanium is one of the most common metals in the earth's crust; only the conversion from ore to metal is difficult. 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-present-and-future 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?

fy20 3y ago

Factories in the USSR often had a shortage of parts, but they still had to meet production quotas. This usually meant a reduction in quality, but it goes the other way too. I've heard stories that consumer appliance factories would run out of stainless steel, so they would use titanium alloy instead, as it was more plentiful. In my country, one of the most unique consumer appliances they made was a potato grating machine. Today the same device continues to made, unchanged since Soviet times.

smcl 3y ago
Is Titanium not famously quite hard to work with? I imagine that it would be hard to sub in for stainless steel, so for normal white goods I don't know if it'd be worth it.
- deleted 3y ago
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- int_19h 3y ago
  FWIW, for a while (before the war in Ukraine), VSMPO-Avisma, the largest titanium extractor and exporter in Russia, was selling stuff like titanium gardening shovels, rakes etc on Amazon and eBay.
  - smcl 3y ago
    Ahh so maybe the expensive or difficult titanium work is the really high-end stuff like SR-71? I just recall from Skunk Works that they had a tough time working with it.
    - int_19h 3y ago
      It's definitely harder to work, but I suspect that once they invest into the appropriate tooling (for military products where it has to be titanium), it's easy and relatively cheap to repurpose for other products.

LispSporks22 3y ago

Sounds like one of those oft repeated, memorable bullshit stories like the NASA space pen. Does the book site sources?

auxym 3y ago
It's mentioned at least in Skunk Works, which is a first hand account from a Lockheed engineer that worked alongside Kelly Johnson during SR71 development. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/101438.Skunk_Works https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/101438.Skunk_Works
- smcl 3y ago
  It's a good read, but I always wondered how much is embellished. I don't know if the pizza ovens anecdote being present there confirms its authenticity, it could be that Ben Rich had just heard about it through the grapevine or even that this book was how the story got spread in the first place.
- cm277 3y ago
  This; also, the more interesting tidbit is that the US at that point hadnt really developed anything with titanium (for the same reason; most of it was in the USSR) so Lockheed had to develop all the tooling for the SR-71 internally as well, just to be able to work with it --regular steel tools simply couldn't handle titanium. +1 on the "Skunk Works" book just for the stories...

mmmBacon 3y ago

As a kid I was totally obsessed with this plane. As cheesy as it sounds the movie The Right Stuff served as inspiration. I wanted to become someone to fly it. I must have built this model at different scales 15 different times and devoured everything I could learn about the SR-71. Unfortunately I graduated from high school in 1991 and the peace dividend was in full effect. I also found out in college later that my eyesight and color blindness wouldn’t qualify me to fly. So I studied physics instead. As a professional engineer with 30 years of experience it continues to awe me that they were able to build such a machine in 1964.

readthenotes1 3y ago

Was this AI generated? The amount of repeat text is concerning if from a hunan

JDEW 3y ago
I was thinking the same. > ...they fraudulently possibly told their comrades... > ...by flying to the heavens. These sentences, among others, strike me as odd/unnatural, but I'm not a native speaker.

j16sdiz 3y ago

Ugh. Another content farm to block.

analog31 3y ago

What puzzles me is that I think titanium dioxide was already widely used as a pigment for paint in the 1950s, which would make me think it was widely available here.

dharmab 3y ago
Simply, titanium dioxide and aerospace grade titanium alloys are not the same thing at all.
- analog31 3y ago
  True, but the article said they were not importing refined titanium alloys. They were importing ore, specifically rutile, which is what TiO2 pigment is made from.
  - dharmab 3y ago
    That part of the article is wrong- I just opened my copy of Ben Rich's memoirs and it says they needed alloy, not ore. Apparently their US supplier had insufficient quantities.
    - analog31 3y ago
      Ah, that would explain it. ;-)

MichaelMoser123 3y ago

They were also quite good at processing Titanium, for example the monument to Yuri Gagarin in Moscow is made out of a Titanium alloy (the monument looks like superman, if you ask me). They had to melt and cast titanium ingots in a vacuum oven, then assemble the components into the statue. This technique wasn't repeated very often, as far as i know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_Yuri_Gagarin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_Yuri_Gagarin Also see the Russian wikipedia article for a better picture of the monument: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%B0%D0%BC%D1%8F%D1%82%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BA_%D0%93%D0%B0%D0%B3%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%83_(%D0%9C%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B2%D0%B0) https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%B0%D0%BC%D1%8F%D1%82...

thriftwy 3y ago
I believe I had a Soviet stove in my early childhood whose burners were made out of titanium, at least they were super light like made from plastic.
- SergeAx 3y ago
  It probably was silumin, silicon-aluminium alloy.
sofixa 3y ago
> They were also quite good at processing Titanium Yep, and they had a revolutionary (arguably too early for it's time) submarine, Project 705 Lira NATO codename Alfa, that used a titanium hull and a lead-bismuth cooled fast reactor, making it significantly faster than US submarines and even faster than US torpedoes, scaring the US in the process (who bought the propaganda that this sub will be the backbone of the Soviet attack submarine fleet, instead of just a proof of concept that did work, but was expensive and hard to maintain and thus scrapped).
SergeAx 3y ago
There is a much more large-scale monument opened almost 20 years before, used rocket-grade titanium as an external cladding: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_Conquerors_of_Space https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_Conquerors_o...

ww520 3y ago

The Soviets once gave Pepsi a number of its naval ships as payment for Pepsi Cola, making Pepsi one of the biggest navies in the world at the time.

JR1427 3y ago

I doubt any real trickery was involved. The Russians who sold the US the ore wouldn't have cared where the money came from. The US did them a favour by making an effort to disguise who the real buyer was, so the ore sellers wouldn't get in to trouble.

andrew_b0 3y ago

2023 Sanctions blocked exports from the Russian Federation for a wide range of products. This is not about the CP71, but if we look at the simplest personal aircraft, the paramotor, then almost 100% of their titanium frames are produced by 2-3 companies from Russia. There are a huge number of assembly brands around the world, but they all use Russian titanium frames. Russian aircraft engines (RMZ500) account for 80% of sales in the two-seat paratrike segment. In every passenger Boeing and Airbus you will find titanium and magnesium parts produced in the Russian Federation.