A Russian Space Based Laser System
Posted on 12/10/2009 12:37:13 AM PST by ErnstStavroBlofeld
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.
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
(Excerpt) Read more at airspacemag.com ...
Pure B.S.!
All this time I thought the US & Russia were Partners in Space....we did finance the building of that crappy space station did we not?
The Soviets/Russians have cheated on EVERY treaty we ever signed with them. Of course we keep our treaties, but now our fearless leader Zero will sign a nuclear disarmament treaty thinking that;
1). The Russians will keep their word.
2). The real enemy are those war monger Repbulicans.
We will be lucky to survive the next few years.
Liberals and other assorted commies lie about everything. We can not have a treaty with them. We can not elect them to congress or the whitehouse or dogcatcher. We have to vote the ones out that are currently screwing up our country.
Considering that we just now have a 747 laser weapon, I’d say you’re right.
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