The tale, in the comments from your link, comes with the bizarre statement "God Bless Ronald Reagan."
Right wingers often make statements like these when referring to technical issues related to the cold war, which amount to dismissal of Soviet Science, the belief that there was no science and technology in the Soviet Union in Stalin's time. However, the Soviet Union was able to manufacture, during the Second World War, the T-34 tank was superior to those of all other combatants, including the US's Sherman tank. The technology involved advanced metallurgy.
I occasionally read scientific literature from the 1950's and 1960's, including some examples of published conference reports from the early interactions between Soviet and scientists from other countries on their approaches to nuclear power. Of course Americans read copies of Soviet scientific Journals and the Soviets read Western scientific journals. I recall reading an amusing statement somewhere, it's buried somewhere deep in my files and can't pull up the reference easily, that both sides were aware of the technology utilized to make plutonium based weapons because both sides had published the phase diagrams of almost all of major metal alloys of plutonium except that of gallium. (Gallium is necessary to stabilize the delta phase of plutonium in nuclear weapons.) The early conferences took place because scientists on both sides understood that the cat was out of the bag because of what the other side didn't say. The Soviet Union would have developed nuclear weapons without access Fuchs, perhaps a little later than they did. It is also true that the Soviets found the US's "Mike" thermonuclear test laughable, and Sakharov built the first deliverable hydrogen bomb, well in advance of the American technology.
As for jet engines:
Modern Russia dominates the world's nickel supply, using the same arctic mines set up by Stalin using slave labor from the Gulag in 1942. (Before June 22, 1941, nickel was a major export to Stalin's Nazi allies.) I recently wrote about these terrible mines elsewhere: Nickel oxide is literally green, which is good for your very "green" electric car that's saving...
Nickel is the base metal for almost all superalloys, essential to the manufacture of jet engines. (I note that during the war the big limitation for the Nazi efforts to scale up the ME-262 was a lack of access to Nickel.) I'm sure one form of espionage was simply to look at the metals the Germans ordered from the Soviet Union.
This is not to say that it was any less true in the 20th century that industrial espionage took place than it did. It surely did. But secrecy has always had limits.
Just as the US and Britain were anxious to employ German scientists, for their expertise, including those who participated in horrific abuse of slave labor (Werner Von Braun for example), and also carefully studied captured industrial facilities, so too did the Soviets. In fact the Soviet Union captured more of Nazi Germany's surface area than did the Western allies. I don't think they needed British swarf to build the MIG. (There, I got to use the word in a sentence!!!! - Thanks for the opportunity.)
All this said, Soviet scientists were no slouches in metallurgy. They were very advanced.
I have in my library 10 volumes of a series on the analytical chemistry of various elements that was written by Soviet Scientists in the 1950s and 1960s and translated into English by Isreali scientists in 1963. It's an excellent overview of the chemistry of elements, including niobium and tantalum, elements crucial to some classes of advanced alloys. I can still refer to texts in these series and learn new things. Most of the cited literature is Russian.
I note that Russia also dominates the world supply of rhenium and one of my favorite commentaries from the above mentioned series is a discussion of technetium and how foolish the author considered that this important element, a very close analogue of rhenium, a position which more than half a century later, while the element is foolishly considered "nuclear waste." Precisely one reason this element may prove essential to technology because of its applicability in super alloys. The world supply of rhenium is not going to last very long.
Oh, and Ronald Reagan was a fool.
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