There’s an interesting book out Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley

The interesting thing is that effort got going in the 1960′s but wasn’t able to keep up with the west. Why not? well in the soviet system they would have needed a steady stream of high powered defector/spies to keep fertilizing their dead system. it looks like that pretty much stopped after the mcCarthy era.

the other question to ask is…are the chinese succeeding in getting this steady stream of defector/spies in way that the soviets were unable to do.