Why Russia Lacks ‘Smart’ Weapons

Precision-guided munitions require sophisticated microchips, and Russia has long depended on copying or smuggling them from the West rather than developing them on its own

By Chris Miller. Mr. Miller teaches international history at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. Excerpts:

"Russia’s manufacturing problems go back to the early years of the Cold War, when the need to put miniature guidance computers into the noses of missiles prompted a U.S. invention: the first computer chip, which integrated circuitry on a single piece of silicon. The earliest customers for chips in the U.S. were the Air Force, for the Minuteman II intercontinental ballistic missile, and NASA, for the Apollo spacecraft’s guidance computer.

Just like the Pentagon, the Kremlin realized that chips would transform weapons systems by improving guidance and communications. In the late 1950s, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s advisers promised him that semiconductor devices would soon be used in spacecraft and aircraft for industry and government—even for “a nuclear missile shield,” one scientist predicted. So the Soviets poured funds into defense electronics, building an entire new city outside of Moscow called Zelenograd, which was devoted to designing chips for the Soviet military. “Microelectronics,” Khrushchev declared, “is our future.” Soviet engineers fabricated their first chip only four years after the U.S.

The Kremlin’s chip industry, much like its nuclear weapons program, benefited from spies. Two American electrical engineers, Alfred Sarant and Joel Barr, defected to the U.S.S.R. after the Rosenberg spy ring was broken up and helped to build Soviet computers. More important, though, were the lessons that Soviet scientists acquired legally from Silicon Valley. In fall 1959, just as the pioneering chip maker Fairchild Semiconductor was inventing its first chip in Palo Alto, a Soviet exchange student named Anatoly Trutko enrolled down the street at Stanford University to study semiconductor engineering with Nobel Prize-winning professors, before returning to Moscow to run an important Soviet semiconductor facility.  

Around the same time, a different Soviet exchange student, Boris Malin, returned from a year studying in Pennsylvania with a Texas Instruments integrated circuit in his luggage. In Moscow, he handed it to the bureaucrat in charge of Soviet microelectronics, who ordered him: “Copy it one-for-one, without any deviations.”

The “copy it” mentality has pervaded Russia’s chip industry—and its defense sector—ever since. During the Cold War, Soviet military equipment was repeatedly discovered to have replicas of Intel or Texas Instruments chips inside. Despite using the metric system, the Soviets had chipmaking tools that measured in inches, to make it easier to copy American chips.

A strategy of copying was fundamentally mismatched, however, to an industry that progressed with marked rapidity. Moore’s Law, which predicted that the processing power of chips would grow exponentially, meant that the Soviets’ best efforts at replication would still leave them far behind. One popular Soviet joke from the 1980s had an official declaring proudly, “Comrades, we have built the world’s biggest microprocessor!”"