Hypersonic weapons: Why is Russia accusing its own scientists of treason?

14 comments

1. I suppose they follow the star wars canon where you kill all the r&d staff that managed to design a moon sized planet busting technological horror where the most incredible feature is such an incredible efficiency of the engine under any load condition that a single port 1m wide is needed as heat exhaust.
   So why keep these people around and have them go for an other technological horror when you can cut your chances of technological advance by killing them all?

2. Treason is the way for dictators to tell you that you screwed up

3. Soviet  union was a techno powerhouse. Lots of thongs they made worked very well. They were winning the space race by using superior tech. More efficient rocket engines, including spying they caught up to the us nuke program shockingly fast. The migs are good jets etc. 

   All of it on a shoestring budget. Tech up till the 80s worked that way. A man has an idea and tests it. It works or not, try again. 

   Todays tech is all computer sim, development. Ultra advanced material science. You can’t “man power” a super computer. It all costs big money and they is no cheaper option. 

   Russian leaders expect to pay less and get more for their tech. The US and china both have hypersonic tech. Russia has never been a generation behind them in missle tech.

    The scientists claimed that their tech could do things it couldn’t, because you don’t need hypersonic missles to fight small countries and by the time you are shooting hypersonic missles at nato the world is on fire. So lying had zero risk. 

   No one really saw Ukraine becoming a proxy war, where a 20 million hypersonic missle would be fired against a patriot missle battery. Putin called for his best non nuke weapon and found out it didnt exist and he was lied to about it constantly and worse they are unlikely to get anywhere near true hypersonics in putins lifetime. So yeah they kinda committed treason. It’s not smart to kill them off but it’s not smart to let people lie to you with no consequences…..

4. Coly and paste stalin style government and even the fsb are admitting it’s about flattering egos of the higher ups.
   This won’t and can’t end well for russia

5. Because it doesn’t work as advertised.

   Next

6. Being a scientist for the russian empire is a treason to humanity already so they deserve the punishment.

7. tl;dr:

   > Russian treason trials are held behind closed doors, so it’s not clear exactly what they are accused of.

8. I guess it supports the argument that their nuclear weapons including their delivery systems don’t work because technological innovation crumbles under authoritarianism.

9. Publish AND perish.

10. > Why is Russia accusing its own physicists of treason?

    Tradition?

11. Pretty sure it’s  about how well Ukraine swatted those … ” hypersonic ” missles down. Rather than admit that the patriot system is up to the task, they would rather believe we stole information through these scientists.

    What a great country Russia is

12. The scientists that stuck around will probably find other jobs, and the knowhow of understanding and reproducing results from scientific papers will go away, all good.

    I know scientists believe progress is done by personal effort, but the truth is science today is an economy of scale affair, you need hundreds of experts in a field to even move a bit the needle of innovation.

    By hunting known scientists with vague paranoia accusations, Russia ensures they will be even more reliant of external tech. The morons in charge there think they will be able to replicate the IP theft of the ’60 (for example reverse engineering the sidewinder tracking system), but the truth is new technology is nearly impossible to reproduce ( a good example are the amplified night vision systems that use use nano glass tubes to work, where the principle is known, but producing it is nearly impossible)

13. Failure is treason

14. someone didn’t get enough bribe kick up and decided to send a message