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USSR should have supplied a weakened metal that would be only good for pizza ovens.
Even if it were about alloy, it wouldn't have matter that much what alloy Soviet provided, as long as it contained enough fraction of titanium in it that US could refine. US wouldn't have bought it if it didn't contain enough titanium, thus this comment is nonsensical.
Considering a pizza oven doesn’t require titanium… that’s a strange cover story.
Forget wood fired pizza, titanium fired pizza has a way better flavor. I wonder if they really used the pizza alibi for all the titanium or if they diversified. Did they really put all their eggs in one basket?
Plus, titanium dioxide is used as a pigment, which would have reasonably explained a great deal of the rutile ore they purchased.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you could get was Georgian-style khachapuri which is an amazing cheesy butter bread thing. Now there’s a Dodo pizza in every city and pizza-sushi-etc places on every corner.
Khachapuri was certainly known but hardly could be ordered anywhere outside few large cities or Georgian SSR. Most people who knew about it have never tasted it (as is still the case with me).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Khachapuri was certainly known but hardly could be ordered anywhere outside few large cities or Georgian SSR. Most people who knew about it have never tasted it (as is still the case with me).
Many people across the USSR made it at home. Recipes sharing was very popular.
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.
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's airspace. Alone it couldn't catch the 71, but its r33 missiles and 600 kilowatt radar could If you owned a 71 it was probably a pretty bitter realization a plane less than half the price could sho…
In any case, it’s clearly been worth it. The B-2, B-21 and RQ-180, to say nothing of our (sc)ramjet research derives directly from the Blackbird.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a couple Georgian restaurants in the Bay Area, in Palo Alto and Los Altos.
The entire Georgian cuisine is just so good and relatively unknown in the West.
The US "intelligence" apparatus created a particular cover story. There's no actual information as to what the USSR actually believed at the time. If they weren'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's not as if we got them to create a special market based on this cockamamie…