Rust, Worn-Out Equipment-A Threat to National Security

Abstract

Before the sinking of the nuclear submarine Kursk and the fire at the Ostankino [television tower], few Russians were seriously concerned about the country's inexorable slide toward a Rubicon beyond which lay massive technological disasters—caused not by terrorists, strikers, or the fainting of dispatchers from hunger, not even by massive breakdowns in technological cycles, but by a commonplace corrosion that devours metal and cracks ball bearings and pinions.