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

Does any know any more details about this? It&#x27;s a fun tidbit that gets a link&#x2F;article on social media every few weeks, but it&#x27;s <i>never</i> anything more than a tidbit. &quot;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.&quot; But that&#x27;s it. It&#x27;s those 3 facts and <i>only</i> those three facts expressed in anywhere between one sentence and 10 paragraphs.<p>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&#x27;t talk about whether alternatives were considered.<p>I just feel like there&#x27;s probably an interesting story there, but we never hear it, just the tidbit that can fit in the headline.

The US &quot;intelligence&quot; apparatus created a particular cover story. There&#x27;s no actual information as to what the USSR actually believed at the time. If they weren&#x27;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&#x27;s not as if we got them to create a special market based on this cockamamie story.<p>It does make great propaganda for the supposed capabilities of the CIA, though.

Perhaps a more accurate headline would have been this buried deeper in the article<p>&quot;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.&quot;<p>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.

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).<p>They had to melt and cast titanium ingots in a vacuum oven, then assemble the components into the statue. This technique wasn&#x27;t repeated very often, as far as i know.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Monument_to_Yuri_Gagarin" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Monument_to_Yuri_Gagarin</a><p>Also see the Russian wikipedia article for a better picture of the monument:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ru.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;%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)" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ru.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;%D0%9F%D0%B0%D0%BC%D1%8F%D1%82...</a>

&gt; 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…<p>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?

As a kid I was totally obsessed with this plane. As cheesy as it sounds the movie <i>The Right Stuff</i> 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 <i>peace dividend</i> 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.

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&#x27;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.<p>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.

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): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.acquired.fm&#x2F;episodes&#x2F;lockheed-martin" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.acquired.fm&#x2F;episodes&#x2F;lockheed-martin</a>

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

I doubt any real trickery was involved. The Russians who sold the US the ore wouldn&#x27;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&#x27;t get in to trouble.

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

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&#x27;s airspace. Alone it couldn&#x27;t catch the 71, but its r33 missiles and 600 kilowatt radar <i>could</i><p>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.

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

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

2023 Sanctions blocked exports from the Russian Federation for a wide range of products.<p>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.<p>In every passenger Boeing and Airbus you will find titanium and magnesium parts produced in the Russian Federation.

Ugh. Another content farm to block.

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.

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.

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.

So you&#x27;re saying those uranium-powered baby monitors probably aren&#x27;t on the up-and-up?

when is OK to trust a liar?

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