OCR Text |
Show itary power. She is becoming a gmajor industrial power, though she has a long way to go before she can be compared to this coun-J coun-J try. As Life puts it, "For a peaceful peace-ful nation this great internal expansion ex-pansion could make Siberia a rich treasure house of progress. For a nation bent on war, it could produce pro-duce an industrial fortress capable of supplying vast military forces and subject only to difficult, long-range long-range attack." Which choice the Russians will make is the principal princip-al problem the world faces. ing much of her heavy industry behind the Urals, to Siberia, where it would be as remote from attack as possible. The move began in 1930, and it has been greatly ac- celarated since the end of the war. To that end, she is developing every resource as swiftly as she possibly can. All in all, Russia is a major mil- Just How Great Is Russia's War Potential?. Life magazine recently devoted 10 pages to "A Report on Russia's Strength." It appears to be about the most complete survey of the subject yet made available for public pub-lic consumption. And it gives an interesting insight into the resources re-sources of the East as compared with those of the West. First of all, Russia has the world's largest standing army, numbering nu-mbering about 3,000,000 officers and men. It has a large air force, with 14,000 planes in commission. It is rapidly building a submarine fleet of highly advanced design. And, so far as anyone can see, its industrial expansion is keeping up with the ambitious objectives laid down in the current Five Year Plan. As Life says, "These military and industrial prospectives sound impressive, but they are subject to tremendous qualification, particularly par-ticularly in the relation of quantity to quality." First of all, the Russian Rus-sian army is pretty largely on a garrison basis, and is not prepared prepar-ed for an immediate major offensive. offen-sive. More important, in the long pull, is the apparent fact that most of the 14,000 combat aircraft are left over from the war, and are obsolete by modern standards. An exception to this is a jet fighter which, it is believed, is comparable compar-able to the best American and British models of the type It does not seem likely that the Russians have a really first-class big bomber. bomb-er. Their newest model is a version ver-sion of our B-29, which they have developed as a transport as well as a combat arm. In this connection, connect-ion, it is an interesting fact that the Russians "expropriated" one of our B-29s which was forced down in Soviet territory during the war. The crew was treated with all consideration, but the plane simply disappeared. Russia has practically no surface sur-face fleet. Like Garmany, she is concentrating her major effort on the submarine. Life says that she has about 250 of these underseas craft in operation now, of which about 100 are snorkel-equipped. The snorkel is a d-evice for permitting permit-ting the sub and its crew to breath under water, and allows a diesel-powered diesel-powered craft to run below the sea for as much as 15,000 miles. It was developed by the Germans and Russia got a number of the Nazi U-boats when the last war ended. Going on, Soviet production, by her standards, is doing well. However, How-ever, she is far behind the United States. As an example, she will produce less than one-quarter as much steel this year as we will. She hopes to produce 250,000,000 tons of coal in 1950 and we passed pas-sed that level 45 years ago. She is giving everything to upping her output, which is one reason why the standard of living of the Soviet Sov-iet citizen is even lower than in prewar years Finally, Life describes Russia's incredibly complex plan for mov- |