How the West Built SOVIETS Best Fighter Jet

In 1946, Britain approved one of the most controversial export deals in aviation history. Under Prime Minister Clement Attlee, the government authorised the sale of Rolls-Royce Nene and Derwent jet engines to the Soviet Union.

At the time, Britain was financially exhausted. Rationing was still in force, economist John Maynard Keynes warned of a “financial Dunkirk,” and the country desperately needed exports, hard currency, and grain, much of it supplied by the USSR. The Cold War had not yet fully formed, the United Nations was being created, and the Soviets were still recent wartime allies. Relations with Washington were also strained after the US Atomic Energy Act of 1946 cut Britain out of nuclear cooperation despite its role in the Manhattan Project.

The Nene, designed at Rolls-Royce Derby under Sir Stanley Hooker, was powerful but not viewed as Britain’s ultimate engine. It was already being marketed internationally. The United States would build it under licence as the Pratt & Whitney J42, while Britain’s future lay in axial-flow designs like the Rolls-Royce Avon. Requests for complete aircraft such as the Gloster Meteor and de Havilland Vampire were refused, engines were seen as export goods, airframes were not.

Once delivered, Soviet engineers at the Klimov Design Bureau reverse-engineered the Nene into the RD-45, then refined it into the VK-1, adapting the design to Soviet materials and production methods. That engine powered the

Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15, designed by Artem Mikoyan and Mikhail Gurevich, using swept-wing aerodynamics influenced by captured German research.

During the Korean War, MiG-15s operating from bases along the Yalu River devastated B-29 Superfortresses and outclassed early Western jets. Only the North American F-86 Sabre could reliably meet them. British Gloster Meteor units found themselves outmatched at altitude, by an aircraft whose engine lineage traced back to Derby.

What looks like madness in hindsight was, in 1946, a calculated risk by a broke nation trying to survive. Britain didn’t “give” Stalin its best engine. It sold what it believed was export-grade technology, and misjudged just how fast the Soviets could turn it into a weapon.
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