Hello good people,
I’ve been reading about the Soviets and their design of the Tupelov 144, Tu 144 aka Conkordski, and it set me thinking about industrial espionage.
Given a level playing field, in terms of industrial ability, I could imagine it would pay dividends but in actuality how successful has it been?
To give an extreme example knowing that the Royal Navy covered it’s hulls in Copper in the 18th Century is pretty useless if you don’t have to materials or technology to copy or foil them.
I pass the baton to you!
Peter
Yes, I imagine the process is more vulnerable to industrial espionage than the end product. In fact tear-down of competitors’ products and reverse engineering is a time-honored tradition. It’s pretty hard to stop.
Even just seeing, for example, the shape of a product or knowing something can be made to work puts you ahead of the game. The Americans spent a fortune on the Manhattan Project, where one of the questions was “can we actually creat an atomic bomb”? The Russians and the Chinese (and everyone else) proceed from the knowledge that “this can be made to work, figure out exactly how”. Having some further clues from those in the know certainly helped the Russians.
Processes and secret ingredients are a bit harder to figure out, but again, the final product can sometimes give some serious clues.
It wasn’t much of a question, since it had been answered years before. Leo Sizlard wrote on nuclear chain reactions in 1933, for example. Scientists accepted that this question was answered; that’s why Einstein wrote the famous letter to FDR advising him to get started building atomic bombs. In fact, the first nuclear bomb design (the Hiroshima one) was never even tested, because they were all so confident that it would work.
And hardly any of the fortune spent on the Manhattan Project was spent on this part of if – the vast majority of the cost was spent on concentrating & refining the ore into the appropriate fissionable/fusionable uranium isotopes.