- The US had better submarine-launched ballistic missiles and operated close to Soviet waters; by contrast the Soviet Union needed to sneak past NATO and other US allies in order to get to patrol areas. The priorities are different.
- The main producer of titanium in those years was the Soviet Union, and the US maintained a strategic reserve of the metal, which had uses in airplane building.
"To begin with, titanium is an extraordinarily rare and expensive metal"
Titanium is the ninth most abundant element in the Earth's crust. Titanium ore is literally cheap as dirt. Titanium metal may be expensive, but it's not because titanium is rare.
Russia had so much titanium that it used it to make razorblades and even street lamps, it had far less access to steel and especially high end steel so it experimented with titanium for a lot of weird applications including submarines.
It did became quite expert at machining and more importantly open air welding of titanium.
I wonder why they didn't leverage their Ti mfg prowess into mfg'ing Ti consumer products such as Ti flashlights, Ti tools, Ti bike frames, etc. Even Apple got on the Ti bandwagon to prop up their flagging laptop line before they xitioned to Intel CPUs
It is incredibly energy intensive to produce, as in makes Aluminum seem easy.
There are many issues with the Russian economy around effective scaling of things, and while there was a time where massive amounts of electricity were easy to get and use, that time has passed and much of the infrastructure that produced it in the past is rotting and failing.
- The US had better submarine-launched ballistic missiles and operated close to Soviet waters; by contrast the Soviet Union needed to sneak past NATO and other US allies in order to get to patrol areas. The priorities are different.
- The main producer of titanium in those years was the Soviet Union, and the US maintained a strategic reserve of the metal, which had uses in airplane building.