Soviet Responses to Star Wars
In the words of Margaret Thatcher, Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot. The greatest President of the 20th Century, Reagan won the Cold War and brought down the Berlin Wall. He brought America back from the malaise of the late 1970's and restored both American pride and the American economy.
The thesis of the hardline right wing is that key members of the Johnson Administration, in particular Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, had actively sought to weaken and impair the defenses of the United States, motivated by the belief that the cause of freedom was doomed, that the Soviet Union would surely win the Cold War, and that preparing for the eventual inevitable surrender was the best means of survival. In their view, in 1960, the United States possessed overwhelming military superiority over its communist opponents, and by 1968, just eight years, or two presidential terms later, that it turned into mere parody and in some cases inferiority.
Phyllis Schlafly recalled in 2011 that "Henry Kissinger carried out the same McNamara policies all during the Nixon Administration. Henry Kissinger told us what his motive was, and he told it to Admiral Rickover, so we know it on the record. His motive was that he knows the Soviets will win the Cold War, that they will be the superpower, we will be inferior, and his job as National Security Advisor was to negotiate the best second best position he possibly could. In other words, Henry Kissinger was a real defeatist. He did not believe we could win.... the policies he carried out were identical to McNamara’s. In other words, it was a steady reduction of our missiles and warheads and planes and ships and everything, in relation to the Soviet Union, so the Soviet Union wouldn’t feel threatened by us. And he refused to build an anti-missile defense."
Many people believe SDI contributed significantly to the collapse of the Soviet Union by prompting exorbitant expenditures to cope with a perceived threat. Former Soviet diplomat Andrei Gromyko charged that "behind all this lies the clear calculation that the USSR will exhaust its material resources and therefore will be forced to surrender." According to Margaret Thatcher, "The final straw for the Evil Empire was the Strategic Defense Initiative."
The chairman of the Supreme Soviet Foreign Relations Committee in the 1980's, Mr. Vladimir Lukin, was quoted in the Richmond newspaper in September 1993 on the question of whether star wars won the cold war or was a stupidly expensive joke, and his answer was fascinating. He said, "You accelerated our catastrophe by about 5 years." So, at least insofar as the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Supreme Soviet during the 1980's was concerned, SDI, or star wars was a very good investment. For some $26 billion over the years, America saved well over $100 billion with the demise of the Soviet Union and the termination of the cold war.
The USSR's task in the early 1980s was to hold out for a decade and a half at most, to wear down America in the arms race, to devalue the huge investments of the United States in new and expensive weapons with cheap asymmetric responses and bold special operations. And simultaneously - to accomplish an economic miracle, having solved the housing and food problems, becoming the epicenter of a new breakthrough in the scientific and technological development of all mankind.
On 11 March 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He beat his rival, Victor Grishin, a hard-liner, by one vote. Gorbachev set to work to end the nuclear arms race and the Cold War in a series of bold and visionary steps. Just one vote, one single vote from a hand up to a hand held down, would have changed the world.
Ronald Reagan and the entire American right wing had nothing to do with Grishin's loss to Gorbachev. The men who then made up the Politburo - people like Gromyko and Ustinov - had built their entire careers on not caring too much what the rest of the world thought. They were all hard liners in the worst sense of the word.
By the time Gorbachev was elected General Secretary, Ronald Reagan had been in office for slightly more than one full term. During that period he had more than fulfilled his 'get tough' promise. The net result was that the relationship between the USSR and the United States stood at an all-time low. The danger of military conflict had increased. Neither Brezhnev, Andropov nor Chernenko had demonstrated the slightest inclination to back down. Victor Grishin and his supporters were of the same ilk. There is no reason at all to believe they would have been more reasonable.
Some modern authors claim that the SOI program was originally conceived as a bluff aimed at intimidating the enemy's leadership. They say, Mikhail Gorbachev and his entourage took the bluff at face value, were frightened, and frightened of the Cold War, which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
It is not true. Far from all in the Soviet Union, including the country's top leadership, took on faith the information disseminated by Washington concerning "SOI". As a result of research conducted by a group of Soviet scientists led by Vice President of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR Velikhov, Academician Sagdeev and Doctor of Historical Sciences Kokoshin, it was concluded that the "system advertised by Washington" is clearly not capable, as its supporters say, of making nuclear weapons " impotent and obsolete, "to provide a reliable cover for the territory of the United States, and even more so for their allies in Western Europe or elsewhere in the world."
Moreover, the Soviet Union had long been developing its own missile defense system, the elements of which could be used in the Anti-ISO program. In the late 1970s in the TsSKB, under the leadership of D.I.Kozlov, under the direct instruction of the leadership of the USSR, began the development of fundamentally new space objects. This was due to serious changes in the international political situation, and, first of all, with the latest aggravation of relations between the USSR and the United States. As is known [at least accoring to Soviet accounts], in 1976 the president of the United States of America became Jimmy Carter, who, after his coming to power almost immediately took the course to renounce the main provisions of the SALT-1 treaty and to strengthen the US military presence in space. The new US president Ronald Reagan, who replaced him in 1980, further intensified the tension between our countries by proclaiming the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) program with elements of space based deployment. In the media this project was called the "Star Wars" Plan.
In October 1991 in the Literary Gazette Y. Shchekochikhin in the article "The MIC (Bolsheviks) .." with the words of P.L.Korotkevich claimed: "Behind the SOI program stood Baklanov, at that time - Minister of General Engineering his deputy later - Minister Shishkin, son-in-law Kirilenko Semyonov, brother-in-law of Shcherbitsky Gubanov, leadership of the military-industrial complex - relatives ... Everyone saw himself in the new chair after SOI: Baklanov - Secretary of the Central Committee, Shishkin - minister, Semyonov - General Designer. " In the article Shchekochikhin under SOI apparently understood the Soviet alternative to the American program of the "Strategic Defense Initiative", for the military-industrial complex - the Military-Industrial Complex, with the addition of "Bolsheviks", apparently, for the warning. Shchekochikhin so presented Korotkevich in his article: "His work for three decades was top secret. A year ago he slammed the Kremlin door to cross the threshold of the White House on the night of August 19. Today, one of the creators of the "nuclear shield", Pyotr Leonidovich Korotkevich, appears on the newspaper pages for the first time in his life. "Finally, our country learned of the" creator of the nuclear shield" with the help of Shchekochikhin.
Sergey Grigoryants wrote that "... the Strategic Defense Initiative, which Reagan constantly spoke of, led the Soviet leadership into a state of animal fear. Fear was so comprehensive, and distrust of everything and everything, especially the Soviet one, was already so great that the assurances of the academicians Velikhov, Sagdeev and, it seems, even Alexandrov, did not work, that this project is certainly very tempting, but almost impossible: for him implementation requires a supply of energy that exceeds the power of all available on Earth power plants of all imaginable species. But the fear of American power, American capabilities was so great that Soviet academics in the Kremlin did not believe."
From 1983 to 1987, in the framework of the Terra-3 project, a laser installation weighing about 60 tons was installed at the flying laboratory IL-76MD (USSR) -86879. To power the laser and associated equipment in the fairings on the sides of the fuselage, additional turbo-generators were installed, as on the IL-76PP.
In the mid-1980s, laser weapons were tested at the Terra-3 complex, which also provided for firing at flying targets. Unfortunately, these experiments showed that the power of the laser beam is not enough to destroy the warheads of ballistic missiles. In 1981, the United States launched the first space shuttle, the Space Shuttle. Naturally, this attracted the attention of the government of the USSR and the leadership of the Ministry of Defense. In the fall of 1983, Marshal Dmitry Ustinov suggested that the commander of the anti-missile defense forces Votintsev use a laser system to accompany the Shuttle. And on October 10, 1984, during the thirteenth flight of the Challenger shuttle, when its orbits were in orbit around the A test site, the experiment took place while the laser unit was operating in the detection mode with the minimum radiation power. The height of the orbit of the ship at that time was 365 kilometers. As the Challenger crew reported later, during the flight over the Balkhash area on the ship, communication suddenly disconnected, there were disruptions in the operation of the equipment, and the astronauts themselves felt unwell. Americans began to understand.
Putin, in his March 2018 State of the Nation Address, also spoke of new nuclear- weapons bearing missiles being developed by Russia in response to the US having pulled out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and then planting missiles in eastern Europe. He noted that:
"Back in 2000, the US announced its withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Russia was categorically against this. We saw the Soviet-US ABM Treaty signed in 1972 as the cornerstone of the international security system. Under this treaty, the parties had the right to deploy ballistic missile defence systems only in one of its regions. Russia deployed these systems around Moscow, and the US around its Grand Forks land-based ICBM base.
"Together with the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the ABM Treaty not only created an atmosphere of trust but also prevented either party from recklessly using nuclear weapons, which would have endangered humankind, because the limited number of ballistic missile defence systems made the potential aggressor vulnerable to a response strike.
"We did our best to dissuade the Americans from withdrawing from the treaty. All in vain. The US pulled out of the treaty in 2002. Even after that we tried to develop constructive dialogue with the Americans. We proposed working together in this area to ease concerns and maintain the atmosphere of trust. At one point, I thought that a compromise was possible, but this was not to be. All our proposals, absolutely all of them, were rejected. And then we said that we would have to improve our modern strike systems to protect our security."
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