Hladni rat

[apostata]

Čerčil je gromada, to je što se mene tiče van svake sumnje.

Što opet naravno ne znači da nije pravio i užasne stvari i užasne greške.

Kao kod svake gromade i njegove greške su bile ili gromadne ili su imale gromadne posljedice.

 

Njemu, kada ga je stvorio,kao da je Bog rekao - lako ti biti neće, no besmrtnost ti obećavam.

 

I dao mu je ... zato što je bio prvi "od svoje vrste" koji je prepoznao šta je nacizam.

 

Kada jedan od najvećih antikomunista u istoriji, u Parlamentu i to još '37. kaže:

"I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between communism and Nazism, I would choose communism.", to onda nije samo briga za imperiju, za Bank of England, za konzervativizam i za vrijednosti sistema, koji je branio cijeli život, to je nešto drugo - to je stvarna užasnutost pred pojavom apsolutnog zla.

 

Na porodičnom grbu ser Vinstona Leonarda Spensera stoji Fiel per desdichado (Vjeran, ali nesretan), a na onoj tamnoplavoj traci sa zlatnim porubom, koju je dobio od kraljice '53. opet piše Honi soit qui mal y pense (Neka se stidi ko rđavo šta pomisli).

Edited October 30, 2015 by apostata

[Radoye]

 

 

Jebiga, SBBKBB, da su Rusi tih celih godinu dana imali onih 16 divizija na grbaci sto su ih Britanci vezali na Galipolju, ko zna da li bi imali snage da probiju Kavkaz i uopste stignu do Anadolije. Ne moze se jedno bez drugog gledati.

 

 

 

Sve OK, samo kao sto rekoh, da se Galipolje zaobislo tojest da se nije iskrcalo na njegov vrh vec na drugi kraj, em sto bi se postigao isti efekat (deblokada Dardanela) em sto bi se bilo 80-tak kilometara blize Istanbulu kao krajnjem cilju operacije, em sto bi bilo mesta i za manevar i ne bi bili zabijeni na uskom skucenom prostoru. No ja sam laik za vojna pitanja, pa pretpostavljam da su imali razlog zasto su se iskrcali bas tu gde su se iskrcali.

[Korki]

Черчил, расиста, то што се борио против Хитлера не искључује његов расизам. Он се борио против Хитлера јер је молер хтео да постане калиф уместо Британије.

 

In 1937, he told the Palestine Royal Commission: "I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."

 

Опште је познато да су за њега бели протестанти најсупериорнији

Када смо већ код Стаљина и Черчила. Стаљин се са правом оптужује да је крив за смрт око 1-2 милиона људ у Гулазима, маса њих је умрла током Другог светског рата због глади. Са друге стране Черчил је својим поступцима у Индији, 1943, изазвао глад која је однела око 3 милиона живота.

 

Madhusree Mukerjee, author of Churchill's Secret War, has said that despite refusing to meet India's need for wheat, he continued to insist that it exported rice to fuel the war effort.

"[The War Cabinet] ordered the build-up of a stockpile of wheat for feeding European civilians after they had been liberated. So 170,000 tons of Australian wheat bypassed starving India - destined not for consumption but for storage," she said upon release of the book in 2010.

 

Коментар Черчила о Бенгалској глади 1943

 

Churchill even appeared to blame the Indians for the famine,, claiming they "breed like rabbits".

 

Наравно, о томе се не прича у англосаксонским медијима.

Да причамо о паравојној формацији Black and Tans, коју је он оформио за рат са Ирцима, која је чувена по злочинима над ирским цивилима итд.

Сви Черчилови цитати су са BBC.

 

Што се тиче директно Хладног рата, Черчил се залагао за напад на СССР нуклеарним оружјем.

 

Winston Churchill's 'bid to nuke Russia' to win Cold War - uncovered in secret FBI files

• Britain's war-time leader urged the US to launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union to win the Cold War
• He urged Senator Styles Bridges to persuade President Harry Truman to launch a nuclear attack
• He believed a pre-emptive strike on Stalin's Russia might be the only way to stop Communism conquering the West

Edited October 31, 2015 by Korki

[apostata]

@Korki

 

Sve to stoji i ja sam i rekao:

Čerčil je gromada, to je što se mene tiče van svake sumnje.

Što opet naravno ne znači da nije pravio i užasne stvari i užasne greške.

Kao kod svake gromade i njegove greške su bile ili gromadne ili su imale gromadne posljedice.

I pri tome nisam imao u vidu Galipolje ... 'ebeš Galipolje.

[Korki]

Један од значајних сукоба у Хладном рату

 

 

Овај филм је означио крај радње.

 

Све је започело још током немачке окупације Француске у Марсеју, када водећи људи Корзиканске мафије остварају сарадњу са француским сарадницима окупатора у виду Carlingue(француски Гестапо) који даје новце Корзиканцима за сарадњу а они користе новац за ширење мреже дистрибуције хероина.

Француски комунисти су били најјачи у Марсеју после рата а нарочито јаки у синдикатима у Марсејској луци. Са друге стране, Марсејска лука игра огромну улогу у Маршаловом плану али и огромну улогу у шверцу хероина према Северној Америци(сиров хероин увожен из Турске и Индокине)коју држи Корзинска мафија. Почиње велики сукоб ЦИА-КГБ у самом Марсеју где је ЦИА(и француска обавештајна служба) ангажује Корзинску мафију да напада комунисте у Марсеју а за узврат добијају отворен пут за хеорин у САД преко Канаде. Комунисти су добјали налоге преко КГБ да саботирају рад луке кроз штрајкове итд.

Фима "Француска веза" је означио крај сарадње ЦИА и Корзиканаца јер потоњи више нису били потребни. Прешло се на Јужну и Централну Азију и Латинску Америку.

Edited November 7, 2015 by Korki

[Prospero]

Remember the Cold War Terror of the Fulda Gap? Defense Intellectuals Do.

by Bill Fortin

 

Bill Fortin served in the United States Army, 3rd Armor Division, from April 1968 to April 1970. Retired from Bell Labs in 2001, he is currently the CEO of IBS, Inc., an international marketing and systems engineering company. He holds a Master’s Degree in Management Sciences from the University of Baltimore. He is the author of the novel, Redeye Fulda Cold (2015).

 

 

 

Putting a chink in communist doctrine may not have been the primary motive of the reform movement called Prague Spring. However, it did provide the people of Czechoslovakia with a brief view of the concept of western capitalism -- and its potential value. Czechoslovakia's newly elected First Secretary of the Communist Party would introduce some radically new ideas to his people and his party. Reformist Alexander Dubček, on January 5, 1968, released his vision of what he considered to be the future success for his country.

 

However, this breath of spring, and his dream, came to a screeching halt on August 21 of that same year when the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact invaded his country and halted any and all reforms that were thought to be detrimental to Mother Russia and the communist party. Romania and Albania were the only Pact countries that did not participate.

 

History would record that the Czechs attributed the invasion to the “Brezhnev Doctrine,” which specified that the U.S.S.R. had the right to intervene in any country in the Eastern Bloc that performed a shift toward capitalism. In fact, Brezhnev’s Soviet foreign policy specifically announced that “[w]hen forces are hostile to socialism, and attempt to turn existing socialist countries toward capitalism, it will become a concern for everyone indoctrinated in the family."

 

Two months prior to the invasion, several members of the Dubček Cabinet defected to the West. They took with them several interesting documents from the safe in the palace in which the president of Czechoslovakia resided. These official papers were never made public but supposedly clearly outlined a Soviet war plan with intent to fake a NATO first strike invasion of the Eastern bloc countries.

 

According to some this really surprised the NATO intelligence officers, and caused major fallout within the intelligence communities in Europe. The plan specified the immediate use of a nuclear weapons attack. This fact alone caused just about everyone in NATO to discount what they had been handed.

 

The Langley interrogators, however, took exception to this stance and requested an additional analysis be conducted by an outside intelligence contractor. What caused the CIA great concern was the level of detail used to describe the nuclear first strike option. And, even more interesting was the list of the countries that were not to be harmed in the proposed missile barrage. These named countries were the nations of Great Britain, Spain, Norway, and France, with a special notation for the protection of the city of Paris.

 

The result was a CIA recommendation to the U.S. President to immediately respond to this clear and present danger. The highest levels of the U.S. and West German governments were summoned to meet and discuss a complete re-write of the NATO response to invasion, titled MC 14/3 C.

The term MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction, was always considered to be the most distinguishing of all factors blocking a Russian invasion. But by mid-1968, it seemed that was no longer the case. The alerting term, created in the early 1950s, was called DEFCON, which stood for Defense Readiness Condition.

 

The rumored enhancements to the NATO war plan, MC 14/3 C, would mandate an instant escalation to the second highest level, DEFCON-2, for any invasion attempt. This would be followed by an immediate call for a DEFCON-1. The key word in this new policy was “immediate,” with an absolute no-pause-for-diplomacy mandate. Not since the end of WW II in the Pacific has this God-like power been authorized.

 

This theoretical resolve was never made public. The general consensus in the CIA would be to buy as much time as possible so that the second part of the new NATO war plan could be made ready and implemented when necessary. A complex set of military exercises would be hatched and submitted for approval to the highest levels of government.

 

These carefully crafted series of maneuvers would be specifically designed to influence the Russian military mindset. My novel Redeye Fulda Cold projects what would happen if plans were implemented to delay the Russians from coming across the border. Although the final proposed strategy would deliberately draw the Russians to a predetermined point well inside the Fulda Gap, the boldness of the plan would be enough to save us all.

 

The world was about to be changed forever, and its entire future would rest in a new defensive posture known as Fulda Cold. And this, of course, was just one of the many situations facing the free world in 1969.

 

[bigvlada]

 

Two months prior to the invasion, several members of the Dubček Cabinet defected to the West. They took with them several interesting documents from the safe in the palace in which the president of Czechoslovakia resided. These official papers were never made public but supposedly clearly outlined a Soviet war plan with intent to fake a NATO first strike invasion of the Eastern bloc countries.

 

 

 

According to some this really surprised the NATO intelligence officers, and caused major fallout within the intelligence communities in Europe. The plan specified the immediate use of a nuclear weapons attack. This fact alone caused just about everyone in NATO to discount what they had been handed.

 

Slično je bilo i kada je počeo proces rasformiranja NVA. Gotovo sve što je bilo upotrebljivo od opreme je bilo nakrcano benzinom i municijom, moglo se odmah upotrebiti. Išlo se do detalja da su iskovane medalje za vojnike, identifikaciona dokumenta za birokrate u SRN nakon okupacije, novi saobraćajni znaci....

[bigvlada]

Deklasifikovan kamion dokumenata (825 komada  ) koji se tiču projekta američke vojne orbitalne stanice MOL (Maned orbital laboratory) i KH-10 Dorian špijunskog satelita. Stanica nije nikada izgrađena ali je Dorian bio izuzetno uspešan. 

 

 

 

http://www.nro.mil/foia/declass/MOL.html

 

Biće materijala za čitanje do Nove Godine.  :D

[bigvlada]

 

Nešto me kopkalo kod ove strane koju je postavio Namenski pre nekog vremena. Radi se o serijalu članaka povodom lansiranja Sputnjika. I na kraju sam uočio dve anomalije. Prvi obeleženi pasus je zanimljiv iz sadašnje perspektive jer su u vreme lansiranja Sputnjika Amerikanci bili u procesu selektovanja projekata koji će kasnije dovesti do projekta Korona, njihovog prvog uspešnog špijunskog satelita.

 

Drugi obeleženi deo je mnogo zanimljiviji i za mene je pravo iznenađenje. Naime, identitet Sergeja Koroljeva je bio strogo čuvana tajna. Razume se da su strane obaveštajne službe mogle da saznaju njegovo ime ali ono nije bilo poznato javnosti. Koroljev je pisao članke za Pravdu, ali ih je uvek potpisivao kao K. Sergejev dok se ovde spominje njegovo puno prezime. Nagađam da su novine dobile informaciju od obaveštajnih službi a da je njegovo ime nekako izmaklo oku cenzora. 

Edited December 4, 2015 by bigvlada

[Prospero]

U.S. Cold War Nuclear Target Lists Declassified for First Time

 

According to 1956 Plan, H-Bombs were to be Used Against Priority “Air Power” Targets in the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe

Major Cities in Soviet Bloc, Including East Berlin, Were High Priorities in “Systematic Destruction” for Atomic Bombings

Plans to Target People (“Population”) Violated International Legal Norms

SAC Wanted a 60 Megaton Bomb, Equivalent to over 4,000 Hiroshima Atomic Weapons

 

 

The SAC [strategic Air Command] Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959, produced in June 1956 and published today for the first time by the National Security Archive www.nsarchive.org, provides the most comprehensive and detailed list of nuclear targets and target systems that has ever been declassified. As far as can be told, no comparable document has ever been declassified for any period of Cold War history.

 

The SAC study includes chilling details. According to its authors, their target priorities and nuclear bombing tactics would expose nearby civilians and “friendly forces and people” to high levels of deadly radioactive fallout.  Moreover, the authors developed a plan for the “systematic destruction” of Soviet bloc urban-industrial targets that specifically and explicitly targeted “population” in all cities, including Beijing, Moscow, Leningrad, East Berlin, and Warsaw.  Purposefully targeting civilian populations as such directly conflicted with the international norms of the day, which prohibited attacks on people per se (as opposed to military installations with civilians nearby).

 

The National Security Archive, based at The George Washington University, obtained the study, totaling more than 800 pages, through the Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) process (see sidebar). 

 

The SAC document includes lists of more than 1100 airfields in the Soviet bloc, with a priority number assigned to each base.  With the Soviet bomber force as the highest priority for nuclear targeting (this was before the age of ICBMs), SAC assigned priority one and two to Bykhov and Orsha airfields, both located in Belorussia. At both bases, the Soviet Air Force deployed medium-range Badger (TU-16) bombers, which would have posed a threat to NATO allies and U.S. forces in Western Europe.  

 

A second list was of urban-industrial areas identified for “systematic destruction.”  SAC listed over 1200 cities in the Soviet bloc, from East Germany to China, also with priorities established.  Moscow and Leningrad were priority one and two respectively.  Moscow included 179 Designated Ground Zeros (DGZs) while Leningrad had 145, including “population” targets.  In both cities, SAC identified air power installations, such as Soviet Air Force command centers, which it would have devastated with thermonuclear weapons early in the war.

 

According to the study, SAC would have targeted Air Power targets with bombs ranging from 1.7 to 9 megatons.  Exploding them at ground level, as planned, would have produced significant fallout hazards to nearby civilians.  SAC also wanted a 60 megaton weapon which it believed necessary for deterrence, but also because it would produce “significant results” in the event of a Soviet surprise attack. One megaton would be 70 times the explosive yield of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

 

...

 

SAC’s top priority for destruction, the Soviet bloc’s air power, was a complex target system.  Before the Soviet Union  acquired the atomic bomb and significant capability to deliver nuclear weapons at long distances,  SAC’s priority had been the destruction of the Soviet urban-industrial complex, but during the mid-1950s the “greatly compressed time factor” produced a reversal. In the SAC Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959, SAC broadly defined the “Air Power” target: air and missile bases for strategic  and tactical forces, defensive and offensive, but also government and military control centers that would direct the air battle and nuclear weapons storage sites, air industry, atomic industry, and petroleum-oil-lubricants (POL) storage areas.  To this extent, the Air Power category cut across some of the major categories of target systems that Pentagon planners had developed in the early 1950s: strategic nuclear (BRAVO category), conventional forces (ROMEO category), and urban-industrial (DELTA).

 

Given the expansive definition of Air Power, this suggested that targets in major cities such as Moscow and Leningrad could be subjected to H-bomb attack because both were rich in air power targets. For example, according to the SAC study, the Moscow area had 12 airbases. None of them were even in the top 400 airbases on the list so they may not have been attacked immediately, but Moscow had other potentially higher priority targets: 7 Air Force storage areas, 1 Air Force military control, 1 government control (presumably Kremlin and vicinity), 4 guided missile entities (R&D, production), 5 atomic energy research centers, 11 airframe entities, 6 aircraft engine entities, 2 liquid fuel plants, and 16 liquid fuel storage areas, including refineries. Moreover Moscow had a variety of other non-air military objectives, such as an Army military headquarters, Army and Navy military storage areas, and biological warfare research centers that might have been deemed worthy of attack at the opening of the war.  

 

Leningrad was also a prime candidate for high-yield nuclear weapons aimed at air power targets.  It had 12 airbases in the vicinity, as well as such installations as: 1 air frame , 1 aircraft engine, 2 atomic energy research, 2 guided missiles, 3 liquid fuel, 1 Air Force military control, and 4 Air Force military storage areas.

At the heart of the Air Power target system were bases for bombers, missiles, and air defenses. The SAC Atomic Weapons Requirement Study listed alphabetically over 1100 air fields, with a priority number assigned to each. As noted earlier, the number one and number two priority bases on the list were in Belarus—Bykhov and Orsha (a.k.a. Balbasova)—as were four others in the top 20:  Baranovichi, Bobruysk (or Babruysk), Minsk/Machulische, and Gomel/Prybytki. Seven of the top 20 were in the Ukraine:  Priluki (Pryluky), Poltava, Zhitomir/Skomorokhi, Stryy, Melitpol, and Khorol.  Six were in Russia: Pochinok (Shatalovo), Seshcha, Ostrov (Gorokhov), Soltsy, Spassk Dalniy, and Vozdenzhenka.  One airfield, Tartu (number 13 in priority), was in Estonia.

 

...

 

The “Final Blows”

 

If fighting continued once the air power battle was over, the second phase of the war was to be the “systematic destruction” of Soviet bloc war-making potential. The “final blows” in the bombing campaign would strike “basic industries”—those industries and economic activities which most contributed to war-making capability. This was consistent with Air Force ideas dating back to World War II and earlier that the destruction of key nodes in a society’s industrial fabric could  cause its collapse. Toward that end, SAC would drop atomic bombs, not H-bombs, on large numbers of specific installations in designated urban-industrial areas.  As the SAC study indicates, Mark 6 (B and C) atomic bombs, implosion weapons with explosive yields of up to 160 kilotons—some eight times the yield of the “Fat Man” weapon which destroyed Nagasaki—were assigned to the “systematic destruction” mission.   The explosive yields of these bombs were likely to exceed by far the requirements of destroying specific targets in the systematic destruction mission, such as power plants or transportation nodes.

Moscow, the number one urban target, had around 180 installations slated for destruction; some were in the air power category, but many involved a variety of industrial activities, including factories producing machine tools, cutting tools, oil extraction equipment, and a most vital medicine: penicillin.  Other targets involved significant infrastructural functions: locks and dams, electric power grids, railroad yards, and repair plants for railroad equipment. SAC might not have targeted each installation with a bomb but may have used the concept of “target islands” whereby adjacent installations were targeted at a central aiming point.  SAC may have assigned more than one weapon to large industrial complexes, however, because they were regarded as several installations. 

 

What is particularly striking in the SAC study is the role of population targeting.  Moscow and its suburbs, like the Leningrad area, included distinct “population” targets (category 275), not further specified.  So did all the other cities recorded in the two sets of target lists. In other words, people as such, not specific industrial activities, were to be destroyed.   What the specific locations of these population targets were cannot now be determined. The SAC study includes the Bombing Encyclopedia numbers for those targets, but the BE itself remains classified (although under appeal).

 

...

 

Eastern European Targets

 

The SAC Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959 stipulated that with exceptions SAC would use lower-yield atomic bombs against targets in Eastern Europe.  Apparently this was for “political” and “psychological” reasons, to differentiate those countries from the Soviet Union through somewhat less destructive bombing. The exception was air power targets: because of the primacy of that category, such targets in Eastern Europe were scheduled to be destroyed by high-yield thermonuclear weapons.  For example, according to the SAC target list, Brieg and Modlin airfields, located near Warsaw, were 31^st and 80^th in priority respectively.  Tokol airport near Budapest was 125^th in priority, therefore a likely target.  Thus, urban populations in Eastern Europe would be exposed to the fallout and other effects of thermonuclear weapons, eroding much of the distinction between targets in that region and targets in the Soviet Union itself.

 

East Germany was the site of major Soviet airbases and East Berlin itself was a target for “systematic destruction.”  A sampling of the SAC airfields list finds more than a few Soviet-operated installations among the top 200, with some not very far from Berlin. Among them were Briesen (number 140), Gross Dolln (Templin) (number 70), Oranienberg (number 95), Welzow (number 96), Werneuchen (Verneuchen) (number 82).  For example,Oranienberg, which was then a base for Il-28 (Beagle) bombers, is only 22 miles (34 kilometers) north of Berlin. Gross Dolln (Templin), originally a base for Il-28 bombers and later for Soviet fighter aircraft, is 55 miles (66 kilometers) north of Berlin. Werneuchen (number 82), a base for interceptors and fighter/bombers, is about 22 miles (33 kilometers) northeast.  Presumably those bases would have been targeted with thermonuclear weapons which could have subjected the Berlin area to tremendous danger, including radiation hazards.

 

East Berlin had a priority ranking of 61 in the list of urban-industrial slated for “systematic destruction.”  The SAC study identified 91 DGZs in East Berlin and its suburbs: a wide range of industries and infrastructural activities including electric power, railroad yards, liquid fuel storage, machine tools, and radio and television stations.  In addition, East Berlin and its suburbs included “population” targets, as did Warsaw (target priority 62.) The atomic bombing of East Berlin and its suburbs would very likely have produced fire storms, among other effects, with disastrous implications for West Berlin.   Whether SAC conducted studies on the vulnerability of West Berlin to the effects of nuclear attacks on East Berlin or in other East German targets is unknown.

 

...

• Title page, table of Contents and introduction.
• Part 1 Unrestricted Allocation 22 and Cross-reference list %5Bexcerpts%5D
• Category code list
• Airfield list with weapons %5Bexcerpts%5D
• Complex list with weapons %5Bexcerpts%5D
• Part II Restricted allocation [1209 DGZ’s] with airfields list and weapons [complete list]
• Complex List with Weapons %5Bexcerpts%5D
• IV Tabular Presentation [As Outlined in Annex “C,“ Appendix SM 129-56]:

Edited December 24, 2015 by Prospero

[namenski]

Cudno pisu izraze kao sto su 'komunisticka pretnja', 'crvena opasnost', 'sovjetska hegemonija'...

Inace je OK  :)

[bigvlada]

Časopis Missiles and rockets je izlazio u periodu između 1958. i 1968, godine. Kopajući po izdanjima poslednjeg kvartala 1962.godine našao sam dosta interesantnih članaka o pojedinim tehnologijama i projektima, ali su za priču ovde važnija ova četiri članka.

 

Prva dva su radovi urednika koji kritikuju Kenedija i optužuju ga da pokušava da nametne sindikate svim radnicima u industriji. Iznenadio sam se da se koriste tako teške reči kao što je diktator.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Treći članak govori o prihodima vojnoindustrijskog kompleksa za fiskalnu 1962. godinu i promenama u odnosu na 1961,godinu. Četvrti članak je opet urednički komentar na bankarski izveštaj o industriji civilnih i vojnih raketa i pripadajućih sistema. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I ovde se napada predsednik jer želi da uvede promene koje će po njihovom mišljenju smanjiti slobodno tržište u tom sektoru industrije. Budžeti rastu iz godine u godinu ali kompanije ne zarađuju onoliko koliko bi mogle da zarađuju. 

 

Ukratko, sve sam više sklon mišljenju da u Kenedijevo ubistvo nisu umešani nikakvi Rusi, Kubanci , mafija i slični nego ga je o'ladila sopstvena industrija kojoj se mešao u posao više nego što su oni bili spremni da prihvate. 

 

[bigvlada]

Još malo slika nuklearnih aviona, u sovjetskoj izvedbi. 

 

Tupoljev 95LAL i planovi za njegovu unapređenu verziju, Tu 119

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tu 119

 

 

 

 

 

 

[bigvlada]

Još malo papirnih projekata iz Tupoljeva

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[bigvlada]

Soviet Star Wars

The launch that saved the world from orbiting laser battle stations.

 

 

 Mikhail Gorbachev (left, signing an arms treaty with Ronald Reagan in 1987) publicly opposed space weapons, even as the Soviet Union’s prototype laser satellite (painted black) sat on the launch pad. (Background: www.buran-energia.com; Foreground: Courtesy Ronald Reagan Presidential Library)

 

By Dwayne A. Day and Robert G. Kennedy III 

 Air & Space Magazine

January 2010

 

It sounds like something from a James Bond movie: a massive satellite, the largest ever launched, equipped with a powerful laser to take out the American anti-missile shield in advance of a Soviet first strike. It was real, though—or at least the plan was. In fact, when Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev walked out of the October 1986 summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, because President Ronald Reagan wouldn't abandon his Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, the Soviets were closer to fielding a space-based weapon than the United States was. Less than a year later, as the world continued to criticize Reagan for his "Star Wars" concept, the Soviet Union launched a test satellite for its own space-based laser system, which failed to reach orbit. Had it succeeded, the cold war might have taken a different turn.

 

 

While the United Sates pursued its Strategic Defense Initiative, analysts speculated on what the enemy was up to. This artist's concept of beam weapons in orbit graced the cover of a 1987 Pentagon brochure on Soviet space power. (Defense Intelligence Agency)

  

 

Gorbachev (center, looking up, at Energia's launch pad in May 1987) worried about the cost of a "Star Wars" program. (www.buran-energia.com)  

 

The U.S. LACE satellite used for testing atmospheric effects on lasers was a rare bird: a space weapon research project that actually made it to the launch pad. (Defense Visual Information Center)  

 

The U.S. Army's Homing Overlay Experiment (now in the Smithsonian) showed in 1984 that a missile could destroy a dummy warhead. (Dane Penland)

 

 

The spacecraft was known as Polyus-Skif. "Polyus" is Russian for "pole," as in the north pole. "Skif" referred to the Scythians, an ancient tribe of warriors in central Asia—and the European equivalent of "barbarian."

 

According to Soviet space scholar Asif Siddiqi, a historian at Fordham University in New York City, Moscow began working on space-based weapons well before Reagan kicked the U.S. program into high gear with his March 23, 1983 Star Wars speech. "[The Soviets] funded two massive R&D studies in the late 1970s and early 1980s to explore how to counter imaginary American missile defense ideas," he says. Two concepts emerged: Skif—a laser "cannon" in orbit—and another weapon known as Kaskad (Cascade), designed to destroy an enemy's satellites with missiles fired from another craft in orbit.

 

Although some details about these programs leaked out in the mid-1990s, it was not until a few years ago, says Siddiqi, that the full extent of the space weapon plans became known, even in Russia. A former press officer in the Russian space industry, Konstantin Lantratov, pieced together the history of Polyus-Skif. "Lantratov managed to dig deep into the story, and his research clearly shows the enormous scale of these battle station projects," Siddiqi says. "These were not sideline efforts; this was a real space weapons program."

 

Design work began in the 1970s, not long after the symbolic Apollo-Soyuz "handshake in space" between NASA astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts. The famed Energia organization, which had built the Soyuz crew spacecraft as well as the giant N-1 moon rocket, a program that between 1969 and 1972 suffered four explosions, started studying both the Skif and the Kaskad concepts in 1976. Initially, Energia's plan was to use space-based weapons to shoot down American intercontinental ballistic missiles early in flight, when they were still moving relatively slowly. The Salyut space stations, the first of which was launched in 1971, would serve as the core for either the laser-equipped Polyus spacecraft or the missile-armed Kaskad. The stations could be refueled in orbit and could house two cosmonauts for up to a week.

 

The designers quickly abandoned this plan, however, and with it the notion of having cosmonauts live on board the Polyus spacecraft. According to Lantratov, the Soviet Ministry of Defense determined that Soviet technology was not up to the challenge of shooting down ICBMs from space, and directed that Skif and Kaskad instead be used to disable American anti-missile satellites—which didn't yet exist, and hadn't even been approved.

 

Although the United States also had spent considerable amounts of money in the 1950s and 1960s trying to develop a missile defense system, by the mid-1970s this work was winding down, and during Jimmy Carter's presidency, progress on anti-missile systems was minimal. In 1972, both superpowers had signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which limited each to two anti-missile launch sites, one to defend the capital city and one to defend a single base from which ICBMs could be launched.

 

But the ABM Treaty forbade only the deployment of anti-missile weapons, not testing or development, a loophole both sides exploited. Beginning about 1980, when Reagan won the presidency, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California (among them physicist Edward Teller, the so-called father of the H-bomb), along with researchers at other federal labs and a handful of military and civilian policymakers, began looking at "directed energy" weapons—which shoot beams instead of bullets—as a way to neutralize an increasing Soviet advantage in launchers and strategic missiles.

 

Reagan was taken with the idea, and three years later, in a televised speech on national security, he announced a plan to build a defensive shield to "make nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete," essentially changing the nation's strategic posture from offense to defense. The proposal was immediately attacked by Democrats in Congress, who called it unworkable; it was the late Senator Ted Kennedy who tagged it with the moniker "Star Wars." Despite the skeptics, funding for missile defense increased dramatically, and reached nearly $3 billion a year by 1986.

 

As prominent planetary scientist and Gorbachev advisor Roald Sagdeev wrote in his 1994 memoir The Making of a Soviet Scientist, "If Americans oversold [the Strategic Defense Initiative], we Russians overbought it." In the summer after Reagan's Star Wars speech, Under Secretary of Defense Fred Iklé requested a CIA study on how the Soviets might respond. The work fell to three analysts, including Allen Thomson, a senior analyst working for the CIA's Office of Scientific and Weapons Research. Thomson had studied other Soviet military research programs, including efforts to develop directed-energy weapons and sensors for space-based submarine detection.

 

He recalls: "The resulting study basically said that both politically and technically, the Soviets had a very wide range of options for responding to foreseeable U.S. SDI developments." They could build more ICBMs, try to thwart the American missile shield, or attempt to drum up international opposition to the American plan. "There was some recognition that the USSR might be financially strapped if it had to initiate new major weapons systems. But there was no indication that it would be unable to respond," Thomson says.

 

In fact, Reagan's SDI served as an instant kick in the pants for the Soviet space weapons program, giving the aerospace design bureaus the ammunition they needed to persuade the Politburo to increase funding for Polyus and Kaskad. Both projects had been simmering at the Salyut (now Khrunichev) bureau within Energia, and experiments with high-powered lasers for anti-missile work had been under way since 1981. So far the work had been confined to the laboratory, however. Now, in the wake of Reagan's speech, the rubles started flowing for actual flight hardware. The motive wasn't so much fear that the SDI might prevent Soviet missiles from reaching their targets, but something more ominous, and weirder: a conviction that the Americans were about to set up battle stations in space.

 

Paranoid fantasies weren't uncommon among senior Soviet generals, according to Peter Westwick, a history professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara who has written about science during the cold war. "They thought that maybe the [u.S.] space shuttle was going to be doing shallow dives into the atmosphere and deploying hydrogen bombs," he says.

 

Siddiqi elaborates on how the Soviets misinterpreted U.S. intentions for the space shuttle: "To the Soviets, the shuttle was the big thing. It was a sign to them that the Americans were about to move war into space." The official U.S. explanation was that the spaceplane, which debuted in 1981, was to provide routine access to orbit. By the mid-1980s, however, it was also being used to launch classified military satellites (see "Secret Space Shuttles," Aug. 2009). "The shuttle really scared the Soviets big-time because they couldn't figure why you would need a vehicle like that, one that made no economic sense," Siddiqi explains. "So they figured that there must be some unstated military rationale for the vehicle—for example, to deliver and recover large space-based weapons platforms, or to bomb Moscow." The Soviets responded to the perceived threat by building their own space shuttle, a near-exact copy of NASA's, which made a single flight and was then retired in 1993 (see "White Elephant," Dec. 2002/Jan. 2003).

 

Shortly after Reagan's speech, the Soviet Academy of Sciences was asked to assess whether a space-based missile shield was feasible. Evgeny Velikhov, a prominent physicist, led the study group. Their conclusion, says Westwick, was " ‘We looked at it, we studied it, we determined that it wouldn't work.' " But other Soviet scientists were more alarmist, and succeeded in convincing military and political leaders that even if the SDI wasn't an effective missile shield, it could be used offensively, to hit targets on the ground.

 

The idea of orbiting lasers shooting at Soviet territory was truly terrifying. According to Westwick, the theories that floated through the Kremlin about the real purpose of the SDI got batty: "Selective political assassination. Say the Politburo is standing outside on May Day and a single laser could take them all out…. These things are overhead, they're invisible, but with zero warning they could zap you."

 

With such frightening scenarios in mind, the Soviet military accelerated work on the Polyus-Skif laser cannon to destroy SDI satellites. Up until then, the plan had been to use a powerful laser built by the Astrofizika design bureau. But that program had fallen behind; the Astrofizika laser and its power systems were too big and heavy for existing rockets to launch. So when Soviet engineers were told to pick up the pace on Skif, they came up with an interim plan. They would adapt a small, one-megawatt carbon dioxide laser that had already been tested on an Il-76 transport aircraft as a weapon against missiles. In August 1984, the new spacecraft was approved and designated Skif-D, the "D" standing for the Russian word for "demonstration." By January 1986, the Politburo had designated the project as one of the Soviet space program's highest-priority satellites.

 

Meanwhile, U.S. scientists and engineers were having their own problems with space-based lasers. As research proceeded on projects like Zenith Star, which investigated the problems of placing a two-megawatt chemical laser in orbit, the challenges of building and launching such systems became clearer. The SDI organization funded studies of particle beams and an X-ray laser that would be set off by a nuclear explosion, but none of these projects ever came close to being deployed. By 1986 the SDI leadership was shifting its attention away from orbiting lasers and toward small "kinetic kill vehicles," which could bring down enemy satellites by crashing into them.

 

The Soviets, though, stayed the course, and kept working on the demonstration version of their space-based laser, with a target launch date of early 1987. Engineers at the Salyut design bureau soon realized that the laser and its power system—even the smaller one already tested on an aircraft—were still too big for the Proton rocket. But a bigger launcher was in the pipeline: The Energia rocket, named after its design bureau, was being built to carry the new Buran space shuttle into orbit. Energia could carry 95 tons to space, so it could carry Skif-D. The rocket was switched. To keep costs down, engineers looked for other existing hardware to modify and incorporate, including elements of Buran and a part of the canceled Almaz military space station designated the TKS, which later became the core module of the Mir space station.

 

Skif-D grew into a Frankenstein's monster: 131 feet long, more than 13 feet in diameter, and weighing 210,000 pounds, more massive than NASA's Skylab space station. The complex consisted of what the Russians called a "functional block" and a "purposeful module." The functional block was equipped with small rocket engines to place the vehicle into its final orbit. It also included a power system, using solar panels borrowed from Almaz. The purposeful module carried carbon dioxide tanks and two turbo-generators to produce the laser's power, as well as the heavy rotating turret, which pointed the beam. The Polyus spacecraft was built long and thin so that it could fit on the side of the Energia, attached to its central fuel tank.

 

Designing a laser cannon to work in orbit was no small engineering challenge. A hand-held laser pointer is a relatively simple, static device, but a big gas-powered laser is like a roaring locomotive. Powerful turbo-generators "pump" the carbon dioxide until its atoms become excited and emit light. The turbo-generators have large moving parts, and the gas used in the formation of the laser beam gets very hot, so it has to be vented. Moving parts and exhaust gases induce motion, which poses problems for spacecraft—particularly one that has to be pointed very precisely. The Polyus engineers developed a system to minimize the force of the expelled gas by sending it through deflectors. But the vehicle still required a complex control system to dampen motions caused by the exhaust gases, the turbo-generator, and the moving laser turret. (When firing, the entire spacecraft would be pointed at the target, with the turret making fine adjustments.)

 

The system was complicated enough that by 1985, the designers knew that testing its components would require more than one launch. The basic Skif-D1 spacecraft structure was proved out in 1987, while the laser wouldn't fly until Skif-D2, in 1988. Around the same time, another, related spacecraft went into development. Designated Skif-Stilet (Scythian-Stiletto), it was to be equipped with a weaker infrared laser based on an operational ground-based system. Skif-Stilet could only blind enemy satellites by targeting their optics. Polyus would have enough energy to destroy a spacecraft in low Earth orbit.

 

Work on these projects was proceeding at a furious pace throughout 1985 when an unexpected opportunity arose. The Buran shuttle had fallen behind schedule, and wouldn't be ready in time for the planned first launch of the Energia rocket in 1986. The rocket's designers were considering launching a dummy payload instead, and Skif's designers saw an opening: Why not test some of the components of their spacecraft earlier than scheduled?

 

They quickly drew up plans for a vehicle that would test the functional block's control system and additional components, like the gas ejection vents and a targeting system, consisting of a radar and a low-power fine pointing laser, that would be used in conjunction with the big chemical laser. They labeled the spacecraft Skif-DM, for "demonstration model." Launch was scheduled for fall 1986, which would not affect the launch of Skif-D1, planned for the summer of 1987.

 

Meeting such a tight deadline had a human cost. At one point, more than 70 firms within the Soviet aerospace industry were working on Polyus-Skif. In his history of the project, Lantratov quotes from an article by Yuri Kornilov, the lead Skif-DM designer at the Khrunichev Machine Building Factory: "As a rule, no excuses were accepted—not even the fact that it was almost the same group of people who, at that time, were performing the grandiose work associated with the creation of Buran. Everything took a back seat to meeting the deadlines assigned from the top."

 

The designers realized that once they launched the huge craft into space and it expelled large amounts of carbon dioxide, American intelligence analysts would observe the gas and quickly figure out that it was intended for a laser. So the Soviets switched to a combination of xenon and krypton for the Skif-DM venting test. These gases would interact with ionospheric plasma around Earth, and the spacecraft would appear to be part of a civilian geophysics experiment. Skif-DM would also be equipped with small inflatable balloon targets, mimicking enemy satellites, that would be jettisoned in flight and tracked with the radar and the pointing laser.

 

The launch of the demonstration satellite slipped to 1987, partly because the launch pad had to be modified to accommodate a rocket as heavy as Energia. The technical problems were relatively minor, but the delay had a critical impact on the project's political fortunes.

 

In 1986, Gorbachev, who had been general secretary of the Communist Party for only a year, was already advocating the sweeping economic and bureaucratic reforms that would come to be known as perestroika, or restructuring. He and his government allies were intent on reining in what they saw as ruinous levels of military spending, and had become increasingly opposed to the Soviet version of Star Wars. Gorbachev acknowledged that the American plan was dangerous, says Westwick, but warned that his country was becoming obsessed with it, and began challenging his advisors: "Maybe we shouldn't be so afraid of SDI."

 

In January 1987, with Skif-DM's launch just weeks away, Gorbachev's allies in the Politburo pushed through an order limiting what could be done during the demonstration flight. The spacecraft could be launched into orbit, but could not test the gas venting system or deploy any of the tracking targets. Even while the vehicle was on the pad, an order came down requiring several of the targets to be removed, but spacecraft engineers pointed out the dangers of interacting with a fueled rocket, and the order was canceled. Still, the number of experiments was reduced.

 

That spring, as the booster lay horizontally inside a vast assembly building at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the Skif-DM was mated to its Energia rocket. Technicians then painted two names on the spacecraft. One was "Polyus." The other was "Mir-2," for the proposed civilian space station that Energia's leadership hoped to build. According to Polyus historian Lantratov, that may have been less an attempt to fool foreign spies about the mission's purpose than an advertisement for the Energia company's new project.

 

The rocket was rolled out to the launch pad and hoisted to the vertical launch position. Then, on the night of May 15, 1987, Energia's engines lit and the giant rocket climbed into the sky. Whereas most launches from Baikonur head for an orbit inclined 52 degrees to the equator, Polyus-Skif traveled farther north, on a 65-degree inclination. If the worst happened, this heading would keep rocket stages and debris—or the entire Skif-DM—from falling on foreign territory.

 

The Energia rocket performed flawlessly, gaining speed as it rose and arced out toward the northern Pacific. But the kludged nature of the Skif–DM test spacecraft, along with all the compromises and shortcuts, spelled its doom. The satellite's functional block had originally been designed for the Proton launcher, and couldn't withstand the vibration of the Energia's more powerful engines. The solution had been to mount the spacecraft with the control block at the top instead of down near the engines. Essentially, it flew into space upside down. Once the spacecraft separated from its booster, it was supposed to flip around to point away from Earth, with the control block's engines facing down toward Earth, ready to fire and push the craft into orbit.

 

Skif-DM separated on cue, the spent Energia fell away, and the protective shroud over the front of the spacecraft separated. Then the entire spacecraft, as tall as a 12-story building, began its gentle pitch maneuver. Its tail end, actually the front of the spacecraft, swung up through 90 degrees, through 180 degrees…then kept going. The massive spacecraft tumbled end over end for two full revolutions, then stopped with its nose pointing down toward Earth. In the rush to launch such a complicated spacecraft, the designers had missed a tiny software error. The engines fired, and Skif-DM headed back into the atmosphere it had just escaped, quickly overheating and breaking into burning pieces over the Pacific Ocean.

 

In the West, the debut of the Energia super-rocket was reported as a partial success; though the satellite had failed, the launcher itself operated perfectly. The U.S. government almost certainly had intelligence sensors pointed at the rocket as it flew, but what the CIA or other agencies concluded about the payload remains classified.

 

The failure of Polyus-Skif, combined with its immense expense, gave the program's opponents the ammunition they needed to kill it. Further Skif flights were canceled. Hardware being prepared was either scrapped or shoved to the sides of giant warehouses. And the laser never got close enough to launching for anyone to judge whether it would have worked.

 

In his history of the project, Lantratov quotes Yuri Kornilov, the Skif-DM lead designer: "Of course, no one received any prizes or awards for their feverish, two-year-long, under-the-deadline work. The hundreds of teams that had created Polyus were not given an award or a word of thanks." In fact, after the Skif-DM fiasco, some were reprimanded or demoted.

 

We still don't know the entire story. "Even today, there's a lot of sensitivity about the whole program," says Siddiqi. "Russians don't like to talk too much about it. And our understanding of Soviet responses to SDI still remains murky. It's clear that there was a lot of internal debate within the Soviet military-industrial elite about the effectiveness of space weapons. And the fact that the Soviets came so close to actually launching a weapon platform suggests that the hardliners were in the driver's seat. It's scary to think what might have happened if Polyus had actually made it to orbit."

 

Russian space engineers, who are known for being pack rats, may have had the last laugh. The first component of the International Space Station to be launched was the Russian Zarya ("Dawn") module, also known as the Functional Cargo Block. The vehicle was built in the mid-1990s, under contract to NASA, by the enterprising engineers at the Khrunichev factory, who produced it on time and on budget. The main purpose of Zarya is to supply electrical power and to reboost the station, the same role the Skif's functional block would have served. Some Soviet space watchers believe that Zarya began life as a flight spare originally built for the Polyus program. Dusting off old but perfectly usable hardware—or even just blueprints—would certainly have helped Khrunichev meet its production schedule for the space station module during the economic chaos that prevailed in Russia after the cold war. It's only speculation, but if true, it would mean that the old Soviet Union ultimately succeeded in getting a tiny piece of its Star Wars system into orbit. The irony is that the American taxpayer picked up the tab.

 

Dwayne A. Day is a program officer with the Space Studies Board of the National Research Council. Robert G. Kennedy III is president of Ultimax Group Inc., in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The authors wish to thank Anton Smirnov for his assistance in translating the Lantranov article.

 

 

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