Too bad they didn't have anything to reverse engineer in this case...
Posted on 02/14/2014 8:52:24 AM PST by C19fan
In June 1981, the Soviet Union began building a huge, nuclear-powered reconnaissance ship specifically designed to sail thousands of miles to the U.S. missile test site at the remote Kwajalein Atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. There, the vessel would sit for months, hoovering up electronic data in order to determine what America’s most secretive weapons could do.
But the spy ship Ural, completed in May 1983, sailed only once—from the Baltic shipyard where she was built to her home port of Vladivostok—and never went anywhere near Kwajalein. Hobbled by faulty hardware, cursed with bad luck and starved of funds for repairs, today Ural is slowly being dismantled.
(Excerpt) Read more at medium.com ...
Change the name to “Obamacare” and the story is the same.
They could have gotten a lot more by just deploying their “spy trawlers” that were common sights in the Sea of Japan and the North Sea.
The AK-47 was designed by a communist sgt. This ship looks like it was designed by a communist committee.
This ship makes me think of the Jamie Lee Curtis science fiction film “Virus” where the alien life form/program has taken over the Russian vessel for its own purposes.
Having been stationed on board a ship this paragraph jumped out at me.
“Ural didn’t just kill turtles. She also became what Russian Navy Blog described as “one of those rare ships free of rats.” When her electronics were all switched on, something—radiation, perhaps—swiftly killed all the rodents aboard. Rats “only reappeared when the ship moored at the pier.”
I can only say that I personally know men who were unwittingly ‘sterilized’ due to close work proximity to certain pieces of electronics.
I also heard several rumors over the years of people being ‘microwaved’ to death from ship’s fire control radars.
But I’ve never run into a case of all the rats dying on board from the electronics. That my friends is a really ‘unhealthy’ work environment.
No need for spy ships. American corporations hire H1B and others and fail to protect sensitive information.
I had a lot of fun ‘battling’ the Soviet Brand-X ships at Kwaj. They had all kinds of assets trying poke around.
I’ll bet the Classified CIA report on this ship was
This is a significant threat and we need our budget upped 35% to counter it.
Too bad they didn't have anything to reverse engineer in this case...
“We turned on the power and the rats on the ship started to do the funky chicken and then died. Seagulls fell dead out of the air. Schools of dead fish rose to the surface around the ship. Someone was playing a Bette Midler record.”
Not to mention bad intelligence. When did we stop nuclear testing in the South Pacific? 1963 wasn't it?
I have been pointing that out to people since the 80’s.
Funny thing about that plane... Stalin forced the engineers to work with English units of measure and forced the foundries to turn out raw stock in English/US dimensions. He didn’t trust his own engineers to re-engineer the plane. He wanted *exact* copies.
See F-35.
What type of ship is that moored on the opposite side of the pier?
If you’re talking about the overhead Google Earth shot, it looks like a ballistic missile sub. Either a Yankee or an early Delta.
Jeez, it’s big.
I’ll bet that you have some interesting stories to tell.
LOL! Oh, man, do I know the feeling. I was extended aboard a ship whose keel was originally laid in 1943. The experience was sort of like being denied parole.
We used to use "welded to the pier" as a sort of metaphor, not literally. Not that a ship with nuclear reactors taking on a permanent 5% list in port isn't something to raise a few eyebrows. Just glad it wasn't me.
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