Billions spent on Ordinary Chemistry Was called Nanotechnology

B) China does a lot more cargo cult science than real science, due at least in part to the incentive structures (look at the many recent HN items on the subject; it's become a major issue for any practicing scientist). For that matter, true innovations coming out of Japan are pretty rare due to their seniority system; e.g. until very recently every native of Japan that won a Nobel had to leave the country to do his research (which is a form or permanent self-exile, setting the barrier pretty high...).

This is not to say that all furreniers are incapable of Real Science, just that it's a lot more rare than one might think. There are reasons US research universities are rated as the best in the world, with only a few Western ones (mostly in the U.K.?) giving them competition.

He makes no attempt to refute the person he attacks, and the only point of the attack seems to be that he's not linking to that person, because he doesn't like him.

Why bring it up at all? Why not just write your article, refute any arguments that need refuting, and try to sound like somebody worth listening to?

That sort of tone gets you voted down to -4 here in comments. It gets your article skipped too.

From 1996 part of the claim about making centimeter lenths of carbon nanotubes within the year and a mention about spooling them. Smalley claimed that the spooling was just around the corner as well. Carbon nanotubes have a billion dollars or more per year industry for some time and have had over a billion spent on R&D. We are now at about 1000 tons per year for total world production and the common lengths are usually a millimeter or less. Centimeter lengths are still rare. Nanocomp technologies is one of the main companies working with longer than millimeter or centimeter lengths and making a few tons per year of those lengths.

The space race was a combination of re-purposing military hardware (at least for us, only the Saturn boosters didn't start their life as such, I think the same is essentially true for the Soviets) for short term term political advantage. We were claiming to be the most technologically advanced system, yet the Soviets were the first to orbit a satellite (due to internal US bureaucratic turf fighting) and the first to put a man in orbit. To convince other countries that our system was the best we had to match and exceed the Soviet program.

A good counter example is how other countries only got really serious about atomic weapons after we used two in such a public fashion. Both the general concept (E = mc^2) and the specific method (fission of heavy isotopes) had been around for quite some time; it took the prod of war to actually do it.

You'd hope some grant money would go this way, but remember that the existing chemistry etc. establishments are already entrenched in the system and good at getting grant money. In the US they had no trouble spending 'nanotech' money for their usual pursuits.

Also don't forget that this paradigm shift is a threat to the way they've learned to do things. Never underestimate how far powerful people will go when they are faced with what they view as an existential threat. Look at how willing Nobelist Smalley was to flatly lie about what Drexler was proposing and his first choice of a forum, one notorious for not allowing those attacked to respond, for an example of this.

As for point B, it's not just the Asian nations: I don't know about their current status, but it was Brazil's scientific establishment that Feynman viewed up close and personally during an extended visit that prompted him to formulate the cargo cult science concept. Looking at where Nobelists actually did their work would be one way of taking a stab at the question.