May 17 (Reuters) - Three Russian academics who have worked on hypersonic missile technology face "very serious accusations", the Kremlin said on Wednesday, in a treason investigation that has spread alarm through Russia's scientific community.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he was aware of an open letter from Siberian scientists in defence of the men, but that the case was a matter for the security services.
In the letter, published on Monday, colleagues of Anatoly Maslov, Alexander Shiplyuk and Valery Zvegintsev protested their innocence and said the prosecutions threatened to inflict grave damage on Russian science....
President Vladimir Putin has boasted that Russia is the global leader in hypersonic missiles, capable of travelling at speeds of up to Mach 10 (12,250 kph) to evade enemy air defences. On Tuesday, Ukraine said it had managed to destroy six of the weapons in a single night, although Russia disputed this.
Obviously, the failure of the much ballyhooed hypersonic missile must be treason. When politics takes precdence over science in a totalitarian state, science loses and eventually so does the state. Orwell's 1984 imagines a future with technology only slightly more advanced than his own era because science and technology work on absolute truths, like 2+2=4, and in a society where there are no absolute truths, science will advance very slowly. 1984 (1984) did a great job of portraying this barely beyond 1948 technological status.
One of the things I recall from reading the Gulag Archipelago was the continual treatment of failure to reach impossible quotas and goals as sabotage, or as you say here, treason.
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