Soviet Cold War Weapons
No one agrees on exactly when the Cold War started and ended, but the best estimate is it started in 1947 and ended in 1991. One of the causes of the Cold War was the fact the Soviet Union had ceded many countries in Eastern Europe and their authority for doing so was a secret agreement called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany. As you can imagine the Western powers were not happy about this and didn’t recognize the authority of the Nazi government to do this. Aside from these countries, it also occupied other countries and held onto them. Sham elections were held in some areas for different reasons, but the results were always rigged to come out in favor of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was particularly adamant about keeping Eastern Germany, because they had lost 27 million people in the war and they wanted to make sure Germany would never start a war again. I guess on this one point we can understood this even if we didn’t agree.
As the years went by, both the United States and the Soviet Union poured out huge amounts of money to build all sorts of secret weapons. I don’t think anyone really knows the true amount of money spent, because of all of the secret black projects on both sides. It is said we reached a new low in relations with the Soviet Union in the 1980s and it was at that point the DoD was tasked with finding out about weapons the Soviets were developing.
When President Reagan announced the Star Wars initiative many people believe the Soviets were against weapons in space, but in truth they were trying to develop their own space weapons. They were working on an all in one answer to protect Moscow from incoming ballistic missiles. The idea was to use land, air and space based systems to act as a shield. The Soviets had also considered the fact it might be too hard to hit a satellite with a missile, because it might be able to be maneuvered out of the path of an incoming missile since the missile would take time to reach it and no doubt be detected far in advance. To combat this they decided to try and develop killer satellites which they could launch. These satellites would wait in orbit until needed and be much nearer to their targets. The satellites were to be armed with a particle beam. It is said this never saw the light of day, but who really knows?
The Cold War was a time of chemical weapons and these weapons terrified everyone. Both the U.S. and the Soviets had huge stockpiles of these weapons and some were so powerful a few drops could kill thousands of people and they could be put into missiles and bombs among other things. One of the weapons which the Soviets were trying to perfect was actually quite unusual. It looked like a large plane but flew only a few feet about the water. There was some advantages to this vehicle. It flew below radar, it was far faster than a boat and it used what is known as the ground effect to fly. Today this idea has become a curiosity. Some craft were built and tested. There are a few types of these craft around the world such as the German Tandem Airfoil Flairboats or Skimmerfoils. Up to a point a ground effect craft can achieve the same speed as a plane on less fuel and less horsepower. The disadvantages are also there, such as the fact it could crash into a ship or land which was slightly higher than expected. If the seas are rough these craft can’t fly over them even in nice weather, because of changing wave heights.
One of the weapons the Soviets had which really terrorized the U.S. was their submarine fleet. They had the biggest ballistic missile subs in the world and their submarine fleet was very large. It had taken them a while to catch up to the U.S. after we discovered how to launch missiles from under the sea. For a long time they had to have their submarines surface before firing missiles, but they finally perfected the undersea launch. There were a couple of very famous Soviet nuclear submarine disasters as well as two losses for the United States. We lost the Thresher in 1963 and the Scorpion in 1968. The Soviets lost the K-27 in 1968, the K-8 was lost in 1970, the K-219 was lost in 1986, the K-278 was lost in 1989 and the K-429 was sunk two times. The first time it was raised and refitted.
The Soviets seemed to be more interested in laser weapons than even the United States. They studied them for years with the idea they would be ideal for the defense of airstrips and buildings. They also had the idea that a laser mounted on a tank might make a great weapon, but before anything could be finished, the Soviet economy collapsed. Fast forward to now. It is being said some weapons experts in Russia are thinking about going back to that idea and dusting off their prototypes which were not very good. As we all know by now technology has allowed many devices to become much smaller and less power hungry and with the announcement we could put lasers in fighter planes, the Russians might have decided why not in tanks also?
In 1970 the Soviets installed the world’s first anti-missile missiles and installed them around Moscow. The idea was to shoot down any incoming ballistic missiles headed for Moscow. It was always wondered in the early days of this installation if it was really capable of shooting down incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles. The point of the system was it didn’t actually have to hit an incoming missile, because each interceptor was armed with a nuclear warhead hundreds of times more powerful than those dropped in World War II on Japan. Because of this they may have accomplished their tasks, but at what cost to others when all that radiation rained down on them.
As the Cold War continued many spy satellites and space stations were launched. The space stations were also used to spy and photos were continuously being taken of each other’s territory. We seem to be headed into another Cold War period and if we go there it will be a big mistake, this time our economy could fail, because of our huge debt.
