Originally appeared at Popular Mechanics
There is something unnerving about watching Iranians browse weapons built to hunt down and destroy American warplanes.
The International Salon of Weapons and Military Equipment—2010, held at the famed Zhukovsky airfield outside Moscow, outwardly resembles U.S. defense industry shows. Exhibits stand in rows inside a cavernous hangar converted into a convention hall. Engineers and sales flacks talk up their wares. Employees hand out pens tattooed with company names and logos. Clusters of visitors—on the first day of the show, mostly potential international customers—gather at the displays. Here, a couple of Eastern Europeans peer through the scopes of unloaded sniper rifles. There, a group of Asians gawk at a demo of small radio-controlled quadrotors.
This is all pretty standard defense industry fare. But some differences become more apparent when I reach the booth of the Russian firm Almaz-Antey, one of the world's leaders in antiaircraft weaponry and the nation's largest arms dealer. A promotional animation on a large screen hanging over the display shows an Almaz missile streaking toward an airplane that looks a lot like a carrier-launched F-35C Lightning II. The missile closes and the airplane disappears in an orange explosion.
No comments:
Post a Comment