They don't care if it's scrap or not- - - -as long as it's not somewhere in China being reverse engineered. The Russians did that with a crashed B-29 back in the 1940's. I hope the keel-hauled the pilot for that screwup, though!
Yes the fallback plan for B29s that were bombing Japan was, if they couldn't make it back to a US base, was for them to land in our ally, Russia. And more than one did. The Russians began building their new fleet of bombers, an exact copy of the B29.
Yep, the Russkies interred the ships and crews. Later they made a rivet-for-rivet copy at the behest of Stalin.
TU-4 (NATAO Reporting name Bull)
![[Linked Image from upload.wikimedia.org]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Tu4.jpg)
One of their biggest challenges in copying the B-29 was the differences in the metric size sheet metal they had available versus the English measure sheet metal in the original.
They did the same thing with an unexploded Taiwanese Sidewinder missile that got stuck in the tail end of a Chinese MIG during the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1958. It became the Soviet AA-2 "Atoll", and the Chinese PL-2.
