Claimed the United States and Soviet Union Would Continue Developing More Powerful Weapons
THE SECRETS OF SOVIET STAR WARS
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June 28, 1987
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FOR MORE THAN A YEAR, THE wizards of reconnaissance in the United States Government have been obsessed by the mystery of Dushanbe. As they peer into the Soviet Union with their spy satellites, what grips them is not the capital of the Tadzhik Republic itself, but an isolated site south of the city, not far from the Afghan border. There, under construction high atop the region's tallest mountain, is an elaborate complex, bristling with roads, buildings, laboratories and domes, and linked by heavy power cables to the nearby Nurek hydroelectric plant, one of the largest in the Soviet Union.
According to United States intelligence experts - who spoke to this reporter only after great hesitation and demands for anonymity - the domes of Dushanbe will one day house lasers that will flash their concentrated beams of light effortlessly through the thin mountain air into the depths of space. The question that divides the experts is how powerful the lasers will be - and, thus, their ultimate purpose when the complex becomes operational, probably near the end of this decade.
A relatively weak laser, used like a radar beam, could track man-made objects moving above the earth. A stronger laser could damage American communication satellites and ''blind'' those designed to flash an early warning of a nuclear attack. A very strong laser could destroy warheads and missiles. During a war between the superpowers, the Soviet Union might bounce its laser beams off mirrors orbiting in space and toward American intercontinental missiles, destroying the missiles in flight and thus ''mopping up'' the ragged retaliation that could be expected after a pre-emptive Soviet strike.
No American official has publicly acknowledged the existence of the Dushanbe complex (map, page 28). But Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger recently has warned of powerful new Soviet lasers on the horizon. ''We expect them to test ground-based lasers for defense against ballistic missiles in the next three years,'' he said in a major speech last January, concluding darkly, ''I cannot envision any circumstance more threatening and dangerous for the free world than one in which our populations and military forces remain vulnerable to Soviet nuclear missiles while their population and military assets are immune to our retaliatory forces.''
For years, highly placed American officials have hinted ominously about the size and scope of the Soviet antimissile effort, claiming that - as Secretary Weinberger has put it - the Russians are ahead of the Americans ''in many important aspects,'' and making dire predictions about the consequences of Soviet beam weapons for the West.
And for years, with equal vigor, Soviet officials have dismissed such charges. ''The U.S.S.R. does not work in this area,'' a group of senior Soviet scientists flatly asserted in ''Weaponry in Space: The Dilemma of Security,'' a recent book critical of the United States' Strategic Defense Initiative, which is more commonly known as Star Wars.
The public war of words over the Soviet Union's antimissile program tends to generate more heat than light. But a four-month study drawing on Government reports, private studies and scores of interviews with American scientists, intelligence experts, White House officials and civilian sleuths - as well as Russian emigres, defectors and an exclusive exchange with a senior Soviet official - has brought into focus an extensive Russian effort to develop laser and particle-beam weapons.
The Soviet effort, like the American one, focuses on ''directed energy'' weapons -beams of concentrated laser light, and streams of subatomic particles - that would destroy missiles and warheads in flight; space-based sensors, which would track the targets, and powerful computers, which would direct the battle.
The Soviet program is larger than the Administration's antimissile effort, and in some ways more scientifically creative. Nonetheless, it has achieved only a rough parity in developing laser and other exotic weapons, and a poor second in building the key devices, such as computers and sensors, that would coordinate an antimissile system. But whether or not the Soviet system could actually threaten incoming American missiles themselves anytime soon, it might achieve the much easier task of disrupting and crippling the satellites and sensors on which an American antimissile system would depend.
The judgment of how great a menace the program actually poses depends on who is viewing it, with perceptions often colored - even within the Government itself - by political leanings, institutional loyalties and varying familiarity with different aspects of the Soviet program. But a clear perception of that menace is essential to resolve the momentous conflict between those who want to forge ahead and deploy Star Wars as soon as possible - which would be the most expensive military program in history - and those who favor negotiating an arms-control agreement that would slow the race for antimissile weapons.
THE MOST STRIKING fact about the Soviet Star Wars program is its age and consistency. As Anatoly Fedoseyev, a winner of the Lenin Prize and the Hero of Socialist Labor Award for his designs of antimissile radars before he fled the Soviet Union in 1971, observed: ''Since the beginning of Soviet S.D.I., about 35 years ago, this project has never been interrupted or delayed. And I'm sure it never will be.''
Defectors like Fedoseyev, as well as secret agents and sophisticated spy satellites, provide the United States Government with essential insights into the Soviet program. This information is then analyzed in sober, lengthy, detailed - and normally top secret - reports, from which the Government makes public only sketchy details.
The most familiar conduit by which these details reach the public is ''Soviet Military Power,'' a book published annually by the Defense Department that takes a consistently hard line on the Soviet military threat. In its 1987 edition, the book estimates that on their effort to develop lasers alone, the Russians spend $1 billion a year and employ 10,000 scientists and engineers working at more than a half-dozen major research and testing facilities.
American scientists working on the Strategic Defense Initiative program say Soviet theorists are unmatched in the world, producing brilliant papers in areas of basic science relevant to antimissile weapons. George Chapline, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, noted that the Russians pioneered the theory of X-ray lasers whose short wave length makes the beam more penetrating, and thus more damaging, than ordinary lasers: ''The Soviets were the world leader, both in good ideas and the quality of their calculations,'' he said.
As far back as the 1960's, at a sprawling antimissile research center near the town of Sary-Shagan, in the wilds of Kazakhstan, Soviet scientists started tinkering with the laser - a discovery for which, in 1964, three scientists (two Russians and one American) were awarded the Nobel Prize. As early as 1965, an article in an unclassified Soviet military journal suggested lasers might solve ''the problem of destroying intercontinental missiles.''
Today at Sary-Shagan, according to ''Soviet Military Power,'' the Soviet Union is testing several large lasers meant to destroy planes, satellites and missiles. The Russians already have ''some capability to attack'' satellites with ground-based lasers and could put in orbit a ''prototype'' laser weapon to fire at satellites by the end of the decade, it says. According to the Pentagon, during the 1990's the Russians will also be able to loft particle-beam and kinetic weapons (which destroy their targets by smashing them with hardened projectiles moving at high speeds).
The Soviet effort to create futuristic antimissile arms is complemented by their intensive, and longstanding, work on more-conventional defensive weapons. The Soviet Union currently maintains a functioning antisatellite system and an antimissile network that rings Moscow, both centered around ground-based rocket interceptors. It also boasts a vast arsenal of antiaircraft guns, missiles and jet interceptors designed to shoot down enemy bombers and cruise missiles (but that failed to stop a 19-year-old West German pilot in a small plane who flew unimpeded into Moscow's Red Square last month).
William R. Graham, President Reagan's science adviser, noted that the Russians are currently upgrading their antimissile system. ''That means that simultaneously they have ground-based defenses being designed, developed, tested, fabricated, deployed and operated,'' he said . ''That's an enormous technical capacity that feeds back information to them constantly. They test and improve. We don't have that capability in this country.''
The Russians also possess a key prerequisite for deployment of space-based antimissile sensors and weapons - a vigorous space program. Last year, the Soviet Union successfully launched 91 rockets, while the United States, crippled by the Challenger disaster and the misfiring of several other rockets, launched only six. In May, the Russians began test flights of a giant new rocket, dubbed Energia, which can lift payloads about four times heavier than those of the American space shuttles.
THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE Agency, which often presents a less grim picture of Soviet military programs than the Pentagon, judges that in the race to develop exotic antimissile arms, despite Moscow's larger program, East and West are in a dead heat. In 1985, a 17-page C.I.A. analysis found that ''the Soviets are in a comparable, or highly competitive position with respect to the United States'' in the development of directed-energy technologies. In laser research, the C.I.A. found an ''essential equivalence.'' In particle beams, the C.I.A. found that the Russians ''may have the edge over the U.S. in some important areas.''
In a brief but significant passage, the C.I.A. analysts said that the West led the Soviet Union in many of the ancillary technologies considered essential for building a defense system against incoming missiles - ''computers, signal processing, command and control, and radar or electro-optical sensors and sensing systems.''
Private analysts who are critical of the Strategic Defense Initiative program go further. They contend that many of the Administration's estimates of the extent of Soviet Star Wars achievements - and particularly estimates made by the Pentagon - are simply exaggerations that are intended to bolster its own aims during budget battles with Congress.
''The Soviets are five years behind us on lasers, five to 10 on sensors, and at least a decade on computerized battle management,'' said John E. Pike, head of space policy for the Federation of American Scientists, a private Washington group. ''We're sitting here with something like 140 installed supercomputers. And they've got one that's considered to be at the very low end of the spectrum.''
A common error in assessing the Star Wars balance, Pike added, is to assume that Soviet scientists are as productive as their Western counterparts. Not so, he said. Soviet researchers spend hours each day waiting in lines for laboratory supplies, personally fashioning hard-to-get equipment, and satisfying rigid bureaucratic demands. ''The input into the Soviet Star Wars program might be bigger,'' he said, ''but the output certainly isn't.''
Other private analysts counter that Soviet researchers, if less productive, at least have stable, long-term goals. ''The faddism over here is dangerous,'' said Stephen M. Meyer of the Massachusetts Instititue of Technology, an expert on Soviet defense and arms control. ''We have this boom-bust cycle, which is an absolute waste. Meanwhile, they've got this long tradition of steady work.''
Some experts point out that the Russians' steady application has yielded significant, if not brilliant, achievement. ''Since the beginning, they've been behind in technology, and yet they were first to push man into space and surprised all Western observers by producing an A-bomb,'' said Valentin Turchin, a computer scientist who left the Soviet Union in 1977 and now teaches at the City College of New York. ''An old Ford and a contemporary car are incomparable; still, that old car is not a horse - you can take a platoon of soldiers and achieve a military goal. Using their backward technology, [ the Russians have ] created a war machine that keeps the whole world in fear.''
CIVILIAN SCHOLARS who study the Soviet antimissile enterprise tend to see it as far less threatening than do Pentagon officials, former Russian scientists or C.I.A. analysts. Lacking access to spy satellites, these high-technology sleuths comb thousands of Soviet books, documents and scientific papers. Though discovering no great secrets about weapon systems, the scholars gain something as important - a detailed understanding of how efficiently scientific ideas are turned into the exotic technologies that form the basis of the Soviet Star Wars program.
''They have a lot of good ideas, and can develop brute-force prototypes, but getting beyond that is hard,'' said Nikita Wells, a physicist with the Rand Corporation who has conducted several unclassified studies of Soviet particle-beam technology for the Pentagon. ''They don't have the computers or materials. It's primitive. It's a rich country from the standpoint of basic science and natural resources. But whatever they do that's good, the system kills it one way or another.''
An example of stymied innovation is the Radio Frequency Quadrupole, known as R.F.Q., a remarkably compact device for accelerating subatomic particles, making it ideal for use in light-weight, space-based beam weapons. Russian scientists at the Soviet Institute of High-Energy Physics at Serpukhov, a sprawling science center south of Moscow, set amid thick stands of pine and birch, invented the R.F.Q. during the early 1970's. Scientists there announced the discovery in the ''open literature,'' describing its characteristics in technical publications read around the world. ''The Soviets did the first work, and then the West took over,'' said Wells, pointing out that the Russians are now behind in R.F.Q. research.
In 1978, scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, picked up the Russian idea and developed its potential. Today, the technology of the R.F.Q. is essential to the particle-beam weapons that Los Alamos scientists plan to test in space during the 1990's.
Simon Kassel, a senior scientist with the Rand Corporation and author of a study on Soviet Star Wars, said the West in general had an edge because of its economic strength and technical skills. ''It's one thing to do basic research and have a lot of different concepts going, and another to translate it into weapons,'' Kassel said. '' [ The Russians' ] technology base is not as rich as ours. Their machines are crude and their society closed. They are an extremely talented people, with enormous imagination. And yet the system prohibits the full fruition of talent.''
Kassel said a crash Soviet program aimed at closing a key technology gap centered on computers, which are essential to all phases of Star Wars, including the design, development, testing, deployment and coordination of arms for antimissile war. The program is headed by Yevgeny P. Velikhov, vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and a leading figure in Russian Star Wars development.
The Soviet lag in key technologies has made Moscow extremely apprehensive about competing with the West to deploy Star Wars systems, experts say. ''Given the increasing demands on Soviet resources, not only from the economy at large but also the defense sector, the Strategic Defense Initiative threatens a new round of technological competition that the Soviets almost certainly would prefer to forgo,'' wrote Benjamin S. Lambeth, a senior analyst with the Rand Corporation, in ''The Soviet Union and the Strategic Defense Initiative,'' a 55-page study of Soviet antimissile technology he undertook for the Air Force. ''Moscow's discomfiture . . . seems genuinely rooted in an appreciation of the Soviet Union's own resource and technology limitations.''
THE UNITED States, after appropriating some $10 billion to date for a crash program of antimissile research, is moving vigorously ahead in many areas of the Star Wars race. The critical question is what to do with this leverage, especially with respect to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, signed in 1972 in an attempt to limit antimissile systems. The Administration's aim is to go beyond the treaty and deploy a Star Wars system as soon as possible. Caspar Weinberger, in a speech last January, said ''we must seize this opportunity'' to deploy arms in space because the chance to stay ahead of the Russians ''will not remain with us forever.'' In the proposed system's first phase, envisioned for the mid-1990's, the Pentagon would deploy battle stations in space armed with small homing rockets - the most mature of the antimissile technologies now under development. In theory, these rockets would intercept Soviet missiles as they rose over Central Asia.
The alternative is for the United States to sign an arms accord that would combine cuts in the nuclear arsenals of both superpowers with an agreement to forgo intensive development of antimissile weapons for a specified period, perhaps 10 years.
Some experts say such an accord would pose risks for the West. ''A Nobel Prize doesn't protect you from a hostile foreign power,'' said William Graham, President Reagan's science adviser. ''You need more than technical strength. You need the will to pursue that technology, to develop it, to deploy it. Only then does it become militarily effective.''
Moreover, a new treaty, by slowing the arms race, would allow the Russians time to modernize their industries and economy, paving the way for better antimissile work. ''They're playing for time,'' said Kassel, of the Rand Corporation. ''So far, the technological lag has been tolerable for them beause it was confined to traditional technologies that they have mastered. In the new ones, such as computers, their situation is very bad. ... An all-out race is something they dread. It would put an enormous strain on us. You can imagine what it would do to them.''
A key question is whether the West, having signed a treaty limiting antimissile-weapons deployment, would continue to provide funds for research to maintain its technical edge, or whether it would be lulled into passivity on antimissile issues.
''Perhaps the worst outcome of all would be one in which the domestic consensus behind S.D.I. collapsed after enough momentum had gathered to drive the Soviets into vigorous offsetting measures,'' said Benjamin Lambeth, of the Rand Corporation. Such measures, he said, might include further development and deployment of antimissile arms and an increase in offensive nuclear warheads. Together, these steps ''could give Moscow precisely what we originally sought to deny it through S.D.I. - a credible first-strike capability that could be invoked with great coercive effect in a crisis.''
ALTHOUGH A NEW treaty would pose risks, the alternative, Star Wars deployment, is also fraught with problems, experts say. Current Soviet weapons, though perhaps too crude to prove effective against American missiles, might still be good enough to knock out American Star Wars systems in space. Antimissile sensors and battle stations, which are laden with delicate lenses and communication systems, as a rule are easier to disrupt and destroy than nuclear warheads, which are self-contained and ''hardened'' to withstand a variety of attacks.
Indeed, the mountain-top laser facility near Dushanbe might pose a serious threat to the low-orbit battle stations the Administration wants to place in space. ''The electric power going into the facility suggests it may be a pretty powerful laser,'' said John Pike, of the Federation of American Scientists.
In an unusual departure, a senior Soviet science official recently agreed that large lasers could threaten space-based antimissile arms.
''At present, we have a kind of . . . basic research in lasers, just to keep our hands in such things,'' said Roald Z. Sagdeyev, director of the Space Research Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, during a recent visit to the United States. ''But if there were a final decision in this country to go along with S.D.I., I suspect some of these technologies would be very helpful for countermeasures'' - an obvious reference to the view, widespread among Star Wars critics in the West, that lasers and particle beams could be used to disrupt or destroy antimissile systems.
At an arms-control conference in Hamburg, West Germany, last year, Sagdeyev made an oblique reference to the Dushanbe site, noting that ''some installations'' that might have ''rather volatile lasers'' had become a topic of discussion in the arms-control community. These, he assured his audience, were not weapons but new lasers for tracking satellites.
''At a minimium, Sagdevey's explanation is not obviously wrong,'' said Pike. ''The most charitable view is that it could be used for picture-taking of satellites at high altitudes and shooting them up - destroying them - at low altitudes.'' The ultimate purpose of the Dushanbe site may remain a mystery for some time, because the facility is not expected to be finished until the end of this decade.
Nonetheless, the threat of Soviet lasers and particle beams could put into question the feasibility of the Administration's proposed antimissile weapons system, experts say. The so-called ''Nitze criteria,'' named after Paul H. Nitze, the Reagan Administration's top arms-control adviser, hold that any Star Wars system must be survivable against enemy attack and ''cost effective at the margin,'' meaning it should be cheaper for the United States to add a unit of defense than for the Soviet Union to add a comparably effective unit of offense.
If the Russians can easily shoot down or otherwise neutralize American battle stations in space with their ground-based lasers, it seems unlikely such a system could satisfy either of Nitze's criteria.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1987/06/28/magazine/the-secrets-of-soviet-star-wars.html