Russia and the US in the Cold War arms race

Frank von Hippel would have us believe that the Soviet Union did not have a substantial antiballistic missile (ABM) program comparable to the US Strategic Defense Initiative. That is far from the truth. ABM work started in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and was substantially accelerated in the 1970s.

One of von Hippel’s points is that the lasers in the Sary Shagan facility were only 100 W and 20 kW. Yet on 15 May 1987, a 1-MW carbon dioxide laser called Polyus, with a mass of 80 tons, was launched ¹ on the Energya rocket. Mikhail Gorbachev himself witnessed the launch. It was a test of a laser battle station and was far in advance of anything the US was able or planning to do at the time. The von Hippel group’s inspection of the Sary Shagan facility in 1989, two years after a visit was proposed, only means that any facilities the Soviets did not want seen could have been removed in the years in between.

These omissions distort the record.