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No, the battle was an economic one, never a science one. Let’s face it: both the US and Soviet Union had extremely capable scientists. But the entire Cold War

No, the battle was an economic one, never a science one. Let’s face it: both the US and Soviet Union had extremely capable scientists. But the entire Cold War was about which economic system was the “best” and in the end, the Soviet Union frankly ran out of money and could not even test their Buran spacecraft before launching it to see it crash. Running out of money is how you lose this battle.

dijit 3y ago
> the Soviet Union frankly ran out of money To be perfectly fair, this was at least partly the result of the immeasurably expensive clean up of Chernobyl. Estimates vary but the most recent numbers put it at about $700 Billion.
- badpun 3y ago
  SU was economically unviable long before Chernobyl disaster. It was so mismanaged it had large-scale famines, for God's sake.
  - allarm 3y ago
    I don’t think they had famines around 1986. Long before that - yes.
  - p_l 3y ago
    Honestly, it would have had them either way. You can't change the shitshow that was Imperial Russia that easily, and tsarist legacy was hamstringing any reform (for example in the decision to continue the systems of secret police and prison camps - neither was Communist invention) However they did fuckup in many areas in the economy, something that was recognised internally at least by some - as seen by multiple attempts at reforms. Also, one can't discount the unbelievably favourable position of the USA at the end of WW2 when analysing this (in comparison, Soviets started with a worse position than many would believe, because Imperial Russia really wasn't well off)
    - dijit 3y ago
      A lot of people forget that the reason there even was an uprising was because the country was so poor and the upper class was seen as decadent and out of touch.
      - foobarian 3y ago
        Honestly they also seemed to have gotten really unlucky with their last tsar. Makes you wonder how things would have played out if they got someone exceptionally good instead of Nicholas II.
        kwhitefoot 3y ago
        > how things would have played out if they got someone exceptionally good instead of Nicholas II. It's not just the man or woman at the top who make the country work. Peter the Great and Catherine the Great tried to modernize. But the nobility put up a lot of resistance or simply didn't turn up for committee meetings.
    - badpun 3y ago
      > Honestly, it would have had them either way. The pre-soviet famines were of natural causes - crop failures due to droughts etc. After soviets took over the country, these were still ocurring, but were dwarfed by man-made famines, caused by idiotic economic policies (mainly by forced collectivization, which decimated productivity).
      - Attrecomet 3y ago
        That certainly sounds like bs. The pre-soviet famines' causes were directly the repressive, backward, exploitative and simply evil system that existed and forced the peasants to starve so the nobility and select bourgeois upper class members co-opted into the system could live lives of decadence.
        xhkkffbf 3y ago
  - coldtea 3y ago
    Only way back, when the US had the "Great Depression" and millions of starving people as well. And in the USSRs case, it was from an ecomony that had just had gotten into large scale industrial production, after having been way behind under the Czars, and after a major war, a revolution, and several years of civil war. If anything, they did better than expected. Even more so given that they had an inexperienced government, external pressure from unfriendly western countries, and had to prepare for future wars that were already breeding (and luckily the did it just in time for WWII).
    - bitcurious 3y ago
      > Only way back, when the US had the "Great Depression" and millions of starving people as well. The US had millions of hungry people. At the peak of the Great Depression, deaths from starvation peaked at a (still terrible) ~110k. Under Soviet rule, an order of magnitude more, actually millions, perished unnecessarily from hunger just in Ukraine. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-ushistory2os2xmaster/chapter/the-depths-of-the-great-depression/ https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-ushistory2os2xmaster/...
      - coldtea 3y ago
        In much worse conditions, with much worse winters, and from a much worse starting point, in a much more under-industrialized society.
  - skinnymuch 3y ago
    the US and a lot of the capitalist world had the Great Depression and more. Are those “natural”? The country is forcing a recession now and causing poorer people to get squeezed dry.
- sien 3y ago
  Wikipedia puts it at $US 68Bn The initial emergency response, together with later decontamination of the environment, involved more than 500,000 personnel and cost an estimated 18 billion roubles—roughly US $68 billion in 2019, adjusted for inflation.[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
  - dijit 3y ago
    I'm not sure specifically what is included in that number you cited; but $700B comes from here: https://globalhealth.usc.edu/2016/05/24/the-financial-costs-of-the-chernobyl-nuclear-power-plant-disaster-a-review-of-the-literature/ https://globalhealth.usc.edu/2016/05/24/the-financial-costs-...
  - ecopoesis 3y ago
    $68 billion is a lot, but it also only three Big Digs ($22 billion). If Chernobyl killed the Soviet economy it was because it was in already terrible shape.
    - FreshStart 3y ago
      So jets were under the resource curse after the 70s.iran- Iraq war and resulting oil surplus killed them.
gambiting 3y ago
>>could not even test their Buran spacecraft before launching it to see it crash. Wait, what? Buran did launch for a test flight, in a fully remote-controlled flight(something that the US Shuttle couldn't do at the time), and landed successfully. It never crashed.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
  Buran never went through an equivalent of the shuttle approach and landing tests because the An-225 wasn't ready. It was never certain it would fly back successfully on reentry.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    When is anything ever certain? The first shuttle flights flew with only two people who had ejection seats, clearly NASA wasn't certain of success. I've been watching MIT 16.885J recently, it's a lecture series from 2005 about the space shuttle with lectures given about numerous shuttle subsystems by people who actually worked on them, administrators and lead engineers. Several of them have expressed reservations about the systems in the shuttles. Fear that the hydraulic system was a ticking timebomb that should be replaced with electromechanic systems, recounting an early fear that the Colombia breakup had been caused by a landing gear explosion, etc. These guys weren't certain of much, everybody knew it was a risky project. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL35721A60B7B57386 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL35721A60B7B57386
- iJohnDoe 3y ago
  The Brian shuttle orbited the Earth twice in 206 minutes of flight, travelling 83,707 kilometres (52,013 mi) in 3 hours and 25 minutes (0.14 flight days). On its return, it performed an automated landing on the shuttle runway at Baikonur Cosmodrome. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_programme https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_programme
  - arethuza 3y ago
    Oh how I wish there had be a "Brian the space shuttle" :-)
yodelshady 3y ago
> Running out of money is how you lose this battle. True, but I honestly find it hard to conceptualise how that relates to military spending. You think the Soviet population would be better fed if MIC scientists had paid more attention to food production? Unlikely, it seems if anything in the Soviet Union that has a negative correlation. And the factories are, famously, dual use in capitalist or communist systems, so without the military demand, it seems more likely their population wouldn't have engineered products at all. By design, they lacked a middle class. I think it's worth stating: any system that can produce a > Mach 2 fighter is incredibly advanced, that that society was serfs < 100 years prior also incredible. But the products - military or civil - were consistently less rounded, more slapdash, than US fare. We could therefore infer - again, since the factories and talent are dual-use - the middle class drove product quality in both the civil market, and ultimately the military one. They also, of course, didn't trade much with the richest economy in the world - unlike, say, recent China. It certainly seems to be a famous nail in the Soviet coffin that people did know regular civilian life in the West was better, and they couldn't get a slice of that pie.
mnky9800n 3y ago
You literally did what the commenter said Americans would do which is you moved the goal post. Buran was never designed to go to the moon.
tcmart14 3y ago
The Buran did have a successful test flight November 15th 1988 and didn't crash..... Even landed itself.

dijit 3y ago

> the Soviet Union frankly ran out of money To be perfectly fair, this was at least partly the result of the immeasurably expensive clean up of Chernobyl. Estimates vary but the most recent numbers put it at about $700 Billion.

badpun 3y ago
SU was economically unviable long before Chernobyl disaster. It was so mismanaged it had large-scale famines, for God's sake.
- allarm 3y ago
  I don’t think they had famines around 1986. Long before that - yes.
- p_l 3y ago
  Honestly, it would have had them either way. You can't change the shitshow that was Imperial Russia that easily, and tsarist legacy was hamstringing any reform (for example in the decision to continue the systems of secret police and prison camps - neither was Communist invention) However they did fuckup in many areas in the economy, something that was recognised internally at least by some - as seen by multiple attempts at reforms. Also, one can't discount the unbelievably favourable position of the USA at the end of WW2 when analysing this (in comparison, Soviets started with a worse position than many would believe, because Imperial Russia really wasn't well off)
  - dijit 3y ago
    A lot of people forget that the reason there even was an uprising was because the country was so poor and the upper class was seen as decadent and out of touch.
    - foobarian 3y ago
      Honestly they also seemed to have gotten really unlucky with their last tsar. Makes you wonder how things would have played out if they got someone exceptionally good instead of Nicholas II.
      - kwhitefoot 3y ago
        > how things would have played out if they got someone exceptionally good instead of Nicholas II. It's not just the man or woman at the top who make the country work. Peter the Great and Catherine the Great tried to modernize. But the nobility put up a lot of resistance or simply didn't turn up for committee meetings.
  - badpun 3y ago
    > Honestly, it would have had them either way. The pre-soviet famines were of natural causes - crop failures due to droughts etc. After soviets took over the country, these were still ocurring, but were dwarfed by man-made famines, caused by idiotic economic policies (mainly by forced collectivization, which decimated productivity).
    - Attrecomet 3y ago
      That certainly sounds like bs. The pre-soviet famines' causes were directly the repressive, backward, exploitative and simply evil system that existed and forced the peasants to starve so the nobility and select bourgeois upper class members co-opted into the system could live lives of decadence.
      - xhkkffbf 3y ago
- coldtea 3y ago
  Only way back, when the US had the "Great Depression" and millions of starving people as well. And in the USSRs case, it was from an ecomony that had just had gotten into large scale industrial production, after having been way behind under the Czars, and after a major war, a revolution, and several years of civil war. If anything, they did better than expected. Even more so given that they had an inexperienced government, external pressure from unfriendly western countries, and had to prepare for future wars that were already breeding (and luckily the did it just in time for WWII).
  - bitcurious 3y ago
    > Only way back, when the US had the "Great Depression" and millions of starving people as well. The US had millions of hungry people. At the peak of the Great Depression, deaths from starvation peaked at a (still terrible) ~110k. Under Soviet rule, an order of magnitude more, actually millions, perished unnecessarily from hunger just in Ukraine. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-ushistory2os2xmaster/chapter/the-depths-of-the-great-depression/ https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-ushistory2os2xmaster/...
    - coldtea 3y ago
      In much worse conditions, with much worse winters, and from a much worse starting point, in a much more under-industrialized society.
- skinnymuch 3y ago
  the US and a lot of the capitalist world had the Great Depression and more. Are those “natural”? The country is forcing a recession now and causing poorer people to get squeezed dry.
sien 3y ago
Wikipedia puts it at $US 68Bn The initial emergency response, together with later decontamination of the environment, involved more than 500,000 personnel and cost an estimated 18 billion roubles—roughly US $68 billion in 2019, adjusted for inflation.[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
- dijit 3y ago
  I'm not sure specifically what is included in that number you cited; but $700B comes from here: https://globalhealth.usc.edu/2016/05/24/the-financial-costs-of-the-chernobyl-nuclear-power-plant-disaster-a-review-of-the-literature/ https://globalhealth.usc.edu/2016/05/24/the-financial-costs-...
- ecopoesis 3y ago
  $68 billion is a lot, but it also only three Big Digs ($22 billion). If Chernobyl killed the Soviet economy it was because it was in already terrible shape.
  - FreshStart 3y ago
    So jets were under the resource curse after the 70s.iran- Iraq war and resulting oil surplus killed them.

gambiting 3y ago

>>could not even test their Buran spacecraft before launching it to see it crash. Wait, what? Buran did launch for a test flight, in a fully remote-controlled flight(something that the US Shuttle couldn't do at the time), and landed successfully. It never crashed.

kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
Buran never went through an equivalent of the shuttle approach and landing tests because the An-225 wasn't ready. It was never certain it would fly back successfully on reentry.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  When is anything ever certain? The first shuttle flights flew with only two people who had ejection seats, clearly NASA wasn't certain of success. I've been watching MIT 16.885J recently, it's a lecture series from 2005 about the space shuttle with lectures given about numerous shuttle subsystems by people who actually worked on them, administrators and lead engineers. Several of them have expressed reservations about the systems in the shuttles. Fear that the hydraulic system was a ticking timebomb that should be replaced with electromechanic systems, recounting an early fear that the Colombia breakup had been caused by a landing gear explosion, etc. These guys weren't certain of much, everybody knew it was a risky project. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL35721A60B7B57386 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL35721A60B7B57386
iJohnDoe 3y ago
The Brian shuttle orbited the Earth twice in 206 minutes of flight, travelling 83,707 kilometres (52,013 mi) in 3 hours and 25 minutes (0.14 flight days). On its return, it performed an automated landing on the shuttle runway at Baikonur Cosmodrome. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_programme https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_programme
- arethuza 3y ago
  Oh how I wish there had be a "Brian the space shuttle" :-)

yodelshady 3y ago

> Running out of money is how you lose this battle. True, but I honestly find it hard to conceptualise how that relates to military spending. You think the Soviet population would be better fed if MIC scientists had paid more attention to food production? Unlikely, it seems if anything in the Soviet Union that has a negative correlation. And the factories are, famously, dual use in capitalist or communist systems, so without the military demand, it seems more likely their population wouldn't have engineered products at all. By design, they lacked a middle class. I think it's worth stating: any system that can produce a > Mach 2 fighter is incredibly advanced, that that society was serfs < 100 years prior also incredible. But the products - military or civil - were consistently less rounded, more slapdash, than US fare. We could therefore infer - again, since the factories and talent are dual-use - the middle class drove product quality in both the civil market, and ultimately the military one. They also, of course, didn't trade much with the richest economy in the world - unlike, say, recent China. It certainly seems to be a famous nail in the Soviet coffin that people did know regular civilian life in the West was better, and they couldn't get a slice of that pie.

mnky9800n 3y ago

You literally did what the commenter said Americans would do which is you moved the goal post. Buran was never designed to go to the moon.

tcmart14 3y ago

The Buran did have a successful test flight November 15th 1988 and didn't crash..... Even landed itself.