Pepsi

 *Pepsi, the soda company, once ha

d the 6th largest navy in the world.*

It all started in 1959, when then US President Dwight Eisenhower decided to send a bunch of American cultural icons to the Soviet Union as part of a goodwill tour.

Among them was the vice president of Pepsi, Donald Kendall, who had a brilliant idea: why not introduce the Soviets to the sweet taste of capitalism by giving them some free samples of Pepsi?

He managed to get permission from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to set up a Pepsi booth at a Moscow exhibition.

There, he offered Khrushchev a cup of Pepsi, and the Soviet leader liked it so much that he asked for a second one.

Kendall snapped a photo of Khrushchev drinking Pepsi, which became a sensation in the US media.

That photo also helped Kendall secure a deal with the Soviets to sell Pepsi in their country.

But there was a problem: the Soviet ruble was not convertible to any other currency, so Pepsi couldn't get paid in cash.

Instead, they agreed to exchange Pepsi syrup for Soviet vodka, which they could then sell in the US and other markets.

This deal worked well for both parties for a while, until Pepsi's popularity in the Soviet Union grew so much that they needed more syrup than the vodka could cover.

So, in 1989, Kendall came up with another solution: instead of vodka, Pepsi would accept Soviet warships as payment.

Yes, you read that right. Freaking Warships.

As in, naval vessels armed with guns and missiles. The Soviets had a surplus of them after the Cold War, and they were eager to get rid of them and modernize their fleet.

So they agreed to trade 17 submarines, a cruiser, a frigate and a destroyer for $3 billion worth of Pepsi syrup.

That's enough syrup to make 20 billion cans of Pepsi, by the way.

The deal was signed by Kendall and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, and it made Pepsi the owner of the 6th largest navy in the world at that time.

Of course, Pepsi didn't really want to keep those ships. They quickly sold them to a Norwegian company that scrapped them for metal. As such the Ships were in various states of disrepair.

But for a brief moment in history, Pepsi had enough seapower to start a soda war with anyone who dared to challenge them!!