The End of Growth by Jeff Rubin

Author:Jeff Rubin [Rubin, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-36091-5
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2013-09-02T16:00:00+00:00

[ CHAPTER 7 ]

ZERO-SUM WORLD

THE BLACK SEA SHIPYARD IN THE Ukrainian port city of Nikolayev was established by a Belgian-owned concern in the late 1890s as the Nikolayev Shipbuilding, Mechanical and Ironworks. Since then, it’s gone by many names: the Andre Marti Shipyard, Nikolayev South Shipyard and Soviet Shipyard Number 444. Among other notable vessels, the yard launched the battleship Potemkin. A mutiny on board the Potemkin, made famous by an eponymous silent film, was a key event in the Russian uprising of 1905, a precursor to the 1917 revolution that overthrew Czar Nicholas II and ushered in the Soviet Union.

If you visited the Black Sea Shipyard in the mid-1990s, you would have come across the rusting remains of the Varyag. When shipbuilders laid down the keel for the Varyag in 1985, the massive steel hulk was to become the Soviet navy’s second Kuznetsov-class aircraft carrier. But that was before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Construction of the Varyag halted in 1992, after the Soviet navy stopped making payments to the shipyard. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, ownership of the Varyag was transferred to Ukraine. Instead of becoming the pride of the fleet, the Varyag, which was 70 percent complete, was stripped of her engines, electronics and rudder, and left to rust.

Originally projected to cost $2.4 billion, the ship was put up for auction in 1998 and sold for the bargain-basement price of $20 million. As part of the sale, Ukraine stipulated that the Varyag couldn’t be used for military purposes. That was fine with the buyer, a small Chinese tourism company, Chong Lot, which said it planned to turn the boat into a floating casino off the coast of Macao.

The boat spent the next few years being towed around the Black Sea, as Chinese diplomats worked to get Turkey’s permission to let the steel carcass through the narrow straits of the Bosporus. It took until 2001, but the Varyag eventually made it into the Mediterranean. Denied access to the Suez Canal for safety reasons, the Varyag set out on the long haul through the Strait of Gibraltar, around the Horn of Africa and back up through the Indian Ocean to China, a trek that cost millions in fuel and labor and took more than a year and a half to complete. But the ship’s saga didn’t end there.

Instead of docking at Macao, the tugboats made for Dalian, a naval port on China’s northeast coast. Once there, the Varyag slipped off the radar. It reemerged in 2005, painted the distinctive gray of the People’s Liberation Army Navy.

Only twenty aircraft carriers are currently in service around the world, according to Jane’s Fighting Ships, the definitive guide to the world’s warships. The US operates eleven, Italy two, while Spain, Russia, France, Brazil, India, Thailand and the UK have one each. The Varyag, which was commissioned in September 2012 and landed the first aircraft on its deck a few months later, is now China’s first aircraft carrier and the flagship of its navy.

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