Funny about the Soviet Ball Bearings. I was just reading a big write up, with amazing pictures of the numerous abandoned "Space Shuttle" look-alikes that the Soviets had made in the early '80s, flew once with great precision and confirmed it was a viable platform. They then basically dropped the tools where they stood, walked off, closed the massive hangar doors and let them rot for the last 30 years. Totally insane stuff. Tremendous amount of then, cutting edge top secret technology, knowledge and unimaginable expense. Only to just walk away one day. Quite totally and literally in every sense. What a waste.
But, like all of their Cold War Era Nuke components, silos and launch vehicles; They are all still out there. Somewhere. Perhaps rotting and overgrown, reclaimed by the earth. Perhaps a new jungle-jim for the local kids at the park, or perhaps looted, scattered all over the world, refurbished and sold to god only knows who, just waiting to pop back up in the hands of some complete idiot governing body or dictatorship, thus posing a HUGE global threat to us all... and who will now have to go in, find, secure and safely dismantle and dispose of this shit? The good old USA - world police. The former, and very likely current main target of all of these things. So, like it was said about the radical jihaddists, "It is better to fight them there on their streets, than here, in ours", we may in the coming years find it more intelligent, efficient and resulting in less potential exposure to some accident or negligent discharge to attempt to locate, contain, secure and dismantle the stuff over there, then in later trying to track it down from every dark corner of the world, or shoot it down when some ass-hat gets antsy and pushes the big red button because of some silly argument over property lines, port access or worthless islands in the South Pacific off the Korean / China coast.
What a mess we humans make of things. It is never ending.
