Word: civilian
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...Aerohydrodynamics Institute. Employing 10,000 scientists and technicians, the research center combines the theoretical study of aerodynamics with practical experiments on airplanes and spacecraft. In one hangar-size workshop, stress- testing sensors cling like barnacles to prototypes of the new MiG-31 fighter and the next generation of Soviet civilian airliners, the Tu-204 and Il-114. Nearby is the T-128 transonic wind tunnel, where the space shuttle Buran and the Energiya booster rocket were tested with airstreams driven by a 1,000-kW compressor. The center is also adjacent to the Ramenskoye proving ground, the largest airfield...
...Army to fight the White Russians. Lenin's successor, Joseph Stalin, saw his first priority as building up powerful defenses to protect against "capitalist encirclement" and to preserve the "Socialist Motherland." Beginning with the first Five-Year Plan in 1928, industries were divided into A (military) and B (civilian) groups, with the A organizations having first call on all resources...
...long, quantifying the magnitude of the military-industrial complex can be only an approximate business. "We have no way of measuring its size," says Alexei Pankin, deputy editor of the journal Mezhdunarodnaya Zhizn. "The defense industry just takes what it wants, and whatever is left over goes to the civilian sector...
Gorbachev reached the same conclusion, and beginning in 1988 he ordered cutbacks in both military production and manpower. He also directed defense plants to convert further to civilian production. They have always had nonmilitary production lines to take up the slack in weapons cycles, but now they were told to increase the proportion of consumer goods from 40% of their total output to 60% by 1995. If the military-industrial complex was as competent as it claimed, Gorbachev wanted to use it as the locomotive to power his economic reforms...
...military-industrial complex, however, may be short- lived. It is no longer sealed off from the rest of the economy. Inflation is rising rapidly, capital investment is drying up, and the supply system has broken down. At least 500,000 skilled workers have left defense plants for civilian jobs as their salaries and privileges have eroded. People's attitudes have changed. "Once upon a time," a U.S. official observes, "the Soviet worker didn't give a second thought to walking to work and building a tank. Now he wonders...