Cover work
Russia has a rich tradition of creating missile defense systems on its own
It is difficult to call the cooperation of Russia with the West in the field of missile defense (PRO) productive. Nevertheless, until recently, certain contacts did occur. Now, in connection with the events in Ukraine, the dialogue on the topic is unlikely to take place in the foreseeable future, and domestic anti-missile programs, as before, will traditionally develop without regard for the rest of the world. Retrospective look at history question suggests that the scientific and technical background of the past, multiplied by modern developments, ensures the creation of a highly effective integrated defense system against weaponswhich is not at all inferior to the American national and European missile defense.
Dialogue with the West on this topic is terminated. This conclusion was reached by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation after the organizers of the international conference on missile defense, held in mid-June in the German city of Mainz, refused to accept Russia's application for participation in the event. According to the information from Smolensk Square, the reason for the demarche is called “recently appeared various difficulties”, which will not allow creating “proper conditions for the reception of Russian guests”.
Short acquaintance
The Foreign Ministry of the Russian Federation stressed that this step fits into the general line on curtailing the dialogue with Russia on missile defense, which has recently been carried out by the United States and its NATO allies. A statement by the office of Sergei Lavrov says: “Such an ostrich approach cannot but cause concern in conditions when the unrestricted deployment of elements of the US-NATO missile defense system is actively continuing in Europe. This is fraught with a breach of strategic balance and undermining international stability. ”
“The development of the Skif combat space station with anti-satellite laser weapons was carried out in the strictest secrecy”
The current turn of the Anti-State with the USA and the whole West began 12 years ago, when 13 of June 2002 of the year went down in history The Treaty on the Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Defense Systems, signed in May of 1972. The then President George Bush called this document a relic of the Cold War and said: "As commander in chief of the US armed forces, I cannot allow the United States to remain parties to a treaty that prevents us from developing effective self-defense systems."
Since then, the passions over the deployment of this self-defense only increased, especially since in the present version it has a pronounced American-European character. Moscow immediately appreciated the opportunity to influence the global anti-missile initiative precisely through Washington’s desire to tie Europe to this program, deploy a unified missile defense system, which, however, will be divided into national - American with positional areas, in particular in California and Alaska, and the European (TMD).
In 2003, the Russia-NATO Council formed an ad hoc working group on theater missile defense to analyze the interoperability and approbation of joint tactics and related procedures. Beginning with 2004, for this purpose, the corresponding Russia-NATO command and staff exercises (CCR) for regional missile defense were conducted.
But the collaboration ended at the beginning of 2008, when the fourth CSR was carried out. At the height of the exercises, Czech Prime Minister Miroslav Topolanek and American General Henry Obering stated in unison that elements of the overseas missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic would become an integral part of the NATO system. Moreover, a few months earlier, in November 2007, Chief of the General Staff, Army General Yuri Baluyevsky openly warned Western partners: Russia would refuse to participate in the joint theater missile defense project if the Americans tried to combine missile defense systems on both sides of the Atlantic, deploying ten anti-missiles in Poland and one providing radar in the Czech Republic.
In the 2010 year, at the NATO summit in Lisbon, both sides nevertheless agreed to cooperate on European missile defense, but the negotiations quickly reached an impasse due to the fact that our country demanded to provide legal guarantees of non-directionality of the system against Russia. Washington in every way convinced that the system was being created in Europe to counter the threats of Iran and the DPRK, and categorically refused to document the assurances.
In October last year, speaking in Brussels after the meeting of the Russia-NATO Council at the level of defense ministers, Sergei Shoigu said that the joint work is failing because the West does not take into account Russian concerns. “We lack predictability regarding the US and NATO missile defense plans,” the head of the Russian military department regretted.
A complex approach
Speaking at the Ministry of Defense collegium in January of this year, Sergei Shoigu stressed that in recent years new challenges and threats to Russia's military security have emerged: the deployment of a global missile defense system and the deployment of its components near Russian borders, the creation of new effective means of precision weapons in conventional equipment, militarization outer space. It is necessary to take retaliatory measures, the minister stated.
For the first time, the military leadership of Russia assigned such a high status to American plans. Moreover, it is missile defense that is the main irritant in this case, since from a military-technical point of view, complex anti-missile programs are unthinkable in principle without orbital reconnaissance, target designation and defense means along with high-precision firing complexes, both land-based and aerospace-based.
Today it is difficult to accept the fact that the Russian leadership pays little attention to defense against aerospace attack weapons. For this purpose, in the 2011 year, by order of the then President Dmitry Medvedev, the Aerospace Defense Forces (ASD) were created, based on the Space Forces, which appeared in the 50s. Now they include, in particular, the formation of missile defense and control of outer space.
The creation of a unified anti-missile and air defense system, designed to unite not only our own, but also the national systems of allies in the CIS, Russia has been engaged since 2008. This means a gradual erasure of the boundary between tactical and strategic air defense and missile defense. The Russian concept involves the creation of a multi-layered and multi-level air defense / missile defense system capable of hitting air targets at different distances and heights. It will include short-range complexes: “Tunguska”, “Tor-M2”, “Pantsir-S”, “Buk” and “Morfey”, medium-range: C-300 and “Vityaz”, long-range: C-400, C -500, A-235.
At the beginning of 2011, Nikolai Makarov, then occupying the post of Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, announced that the new missile defense system would actually become an umbrella that would close the country from ballistic attacks, medium-range missiles, from various types of cruise missiles - air, sea, land, including from extremely small heights at any time, in any situation.
Nevertheless, the main means of aerospace defense, capable of withstanding intercontinental (ICBM) and medium-range missiles (MRBD), will be the promising C-500 and the modernized missile defense system of Moscow A-235, and the last line - active protection complexes. According to statements by the military, a multi-layer missile defense system will ensure the security of not only the capital region, but also important (for example, industrial) facilities in the rest of Russia.
About C-500 is now little known. The main purpose of the complex is to defeat the warheads of medium and long range ballistic missiles in the final segment of the trajectory. It will be supplied with radars capable of detecting targets at a distance of up to 900 kilometers.
“With regard to the promising C-500 air defense systems, to which the EKR Troops pin special hopes, at the moment its developer has already manufactured separate means of the system and has begun to test them. The work as a whole is planned to be completed in the near future, and the first serial model should go to the troops in a few years. The aerospace defense forces constantly monitor the process of creating a new system. In total, five sets of C-500 are planned to be purchased as part of the State Armaments Program, ”commander of the EKR Lieutenant-General Alexander Golovko noted.
Lieutenant-General Viktor Bondarev, Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Air Force, spoke about the combat capabilities of the promising complex at the end of 2012. According to him, he is able to simultaneously hit up to ten ballistic targets, including the combat units of hypersonic cruise missiles. At the same time, the speed of intercepted targets can reach 7000 meters per second. For comparison: the first cosmic velocity, that is, necessary to bring an object into a circular orbit of the Earth, is 7900 meters per second. The new anti-aircraft complex will use the principle of separate solutions for the destruction of ballistic and aerodynamic targets.
Bondarev also said that C-500 will outperform both Russian C-400 and American MIM-104F Patriot PAC-3 in its capabilities. At the same time, the complex will be used for anti-aircraft and anti-missile cover of large regions, industrial and strategic facilities, it is unified with the existing anti-missile defense system of Moscow А-135, and therefore, with promising А-235.
Experimental and combat training trials of the Moscow ABM A-235 began in the 2013 year. According to preliminary data, this multichannel system will receive the upgraded 53Т6 interceptor missiles currently used in the A-135 system. Anti-missiles of the new system will be able to carry both kinetic and nuclear warheads.
The contract for its creation was signed in 1991 year. Probably, A-235 will receive the Elbrus-3М supercomputer, the Don-2Н radar station and two echelon anti-missiles of a large and medium range. All key parameters of the perspective system are classified, but it can be assumed that C-500 will be able, in particular, to exchange data with А-235, which will improve the accuracy of hitting targets.
The continuity of generations
The USSR and Russia remain so far the only states that have managed to adopt an effective missile defense system. In 1954, according to a special government decree, large-scale work began in the Soviet Union, which was by no means based on an empty place. By that time, the team created by Stalin KB-1 had already successfully solved the task of deploying an almost impenetrable anti-aircraft defense of Moscow. That system, designated C-25, could reflect a "star" (simultaneous from all directions) raid, three times superior to the one that at the end of World War II, the Anglo-American aviation wiped off the face of the earth Dresden.
In 1955, the chief designer of the Special KB-30, Grigory Kisunko, who later became the general designer of the Soviet missile defense system, proposed a bold program of an experimental missile defense system “A”. The innovation was that the scientist intended to use a fundamentally new method for determining the coordinates of a high-speed ballistic target and an interceptor missile, the so-called triangulation. 26 of March (according to other data - 4 of March) 1961-th at a distance of more than 100 kilometers and height of 25 kilometers of missile missile was destroyed by MRSD P-5 with 500 kilograms of TNT launched from the Kapustin Yar test site. In passing, we note that in the US, the same indicator was achieved only after 23.
The 9 of June of the same year intercepted a more powerful MRSD P-12, which flew at a speed of three kilometers per second, as a result of which its warhead was destroyed. In a report to the government it was reported: "... At the command of the computer, the fragmentation-combat unit of the antimissile was undermined, after which, according to the cinema and photo registration, the head part of the ballistic missile began to fall apart."
In the same year, tests of the B-1000 (Р2TA) missile with a nuclear free warhead developed in Chelyabinsk-70 were tested. A direct defeat of the head parts of ballistic missiles was recorded in a number of subsequent tests. In total, the 11 interceptor missiles were launched to intercept ballistic targets. For the first time in the world of anti-missile missiles reached a speed of more than a thousand meters per second (that is, more than three speeds of sound or faster than the speed of a bullet fired from an AKM Kalashnikov assault rifle - 900 m / s), which was an epochal achievement at that time. As a method of guidance, a parallel approach of the antimissile and targets in a strictly oncoming course was chosen.
From the very beginning, the idea of missile defense was hampered by the enormity of the tasks that were prescribed. After all, even three years before the first test success in intercepting the head part of a ballistic missile in the spring of 1961, the CPSU Central Committee issued a resolution on the creation of a full-scale A-35 PRO in the entire Moscow region. The task of covering the entire country was set before the start of the A-35 flight tests. In the end, this raw system was adopted only in the summer of the 1971.
Apparently, it was the assault and the ambiguity of plans for the domestic anti-missile program that brought the development of means for overcoming the missile defense itself to the first place and allowed Russia to take a leading position in this direction by the beginning of the new millennium. Immediately after the aforementioned missile defense tests in 1961, the then leader of the USSR, Nikita Khrushchev, bluffing, said: "Our rocket, one might say, gets into a fly in space." Then Kisunko decided to force work on fairly cheap means of overcoming missile defense. These included the radio-absorbing coatings of missile heads, false targets and active jamming stations.
The “Cactus” product was a shell based on semiconductor films or spinous, like a desert plant, structure. Such a coating applied to the head of the rocket, many times reduced its radar cross section.
False targets of the inflatable type “Willow” are cassettes with a package of dipole reflectors made of synthetic metallized film that was shot in space. The reflectors were inflated by the amount of air that remained in them during the packaging. Active jamming equipment - the Mole station was designed for issuing noise packages for each probe pulse of an enemy locator. Designers have developed and successfully tested the station to counter radar early-detection of targets and counter-firing radar targeting enemy missiles.
Another derivative of missile defense should be considered the development of anti-satellite weapons. The fact is that Grigori Kisunko had an ardent rival - Vladimir Chelomey, General Designer of the OKB-52, who in 1959 proposed a program to combat the enemy’s artificial satellites, and did everything possible to replace the new missile defense project. It must be said that an event played Chelomeyu’s hands, which became, without exaggeration, the true military triumph of the USSR.
1 May 1960, the new C-75 anti-aircraft missile complex finally reached the Lockheed U-2, an American high-altitude photo-reconnaissance aircraft, approaching the Urals, which was still flying with impunity to the Soviet MiG interceptors. Pictures of Francis Powers, who escaped and captured, flew around the world against the background of the wreckage of his plane.
The leadership of the USSR reasonably suggested that now the United States in collecting intelligence is reorienting to the widespread use of spy satellites. Using connections with the country's leadership, Vladimir Chelomey achieved complete domination of the anti-satellite direction. Moreover, Grigory Kisunko got Chelomey under a special order, which did not add to the pace of the missile defense work. By the way, Khrushchev, whose spontaneous, ill-considered actions more than once brought the world to the brink of war, and his own country to the brink of economic collapse, 1960 announced in June that any reconnaissance satellite over the territory of the USSR would be shot down.
If the unlucky Powers was already exchanged in February 1962 in Berlin on the Glínicke Bridge for the Soviet intelligence officer William Fischer (Rudolf Abel), he did not intend to exchange money on strategic armaments. Although Chelomey's Fighter of Satellite program was completely separate from missile defense, did not use its groundwork, in particular for radar support, the Soviet government decided to force both directions at the expense of enormous material costs.
As a result, both the missile defense system and the unique combat space station codenamed “Skif” with anti-satellite laser weapons appeared. Despite the fact that in August 1983, the then leader Yuri Andropov made a sensational statement about the cessation in the USSR of all work on space weapons, in an atmosphere of the strictest secrecy, Salyut Design Bureau continued the development of Skif.
It was decided to test the station during the first launch of the most powerful launch vehicle Energia in May of 1987. And again they were not exchanged for trifles, but they planned to launch a combat model right away, but without expensive armament. In the traditional Soviet rush and assault area, the 80-ton 37-meter station, which received the name Polyus for the media, was mounted on a carrier, and 15 was launched in May. The control system that failed at the de-launching stage did not turn on the propulsion system of the station in time, which as a result fell into the Pacific Ocean. After that, Mikhail Gorbachev decided to abandon further work on the "Skiff". However, the very idea of orbital combat complexes, historically close to the national anti-missile and anti-space defense, has not gone away anywhere and is waiting in the wings for implementation.
It is difficult to call the cooperation of Russia with the West in the field of missile defense (PRO) productive. Nevertheless, until recently, certain contacts did occur. Now, in connection with the events in Ukraine, the dialogue on the topic is unlikely to take place in the foreseeable future, and domestic anti-missile programs, as before, will traditionally develop without regard for the rest of the world. Retrospective look at history question suggests that the scientific and technical background of the past, multiplied by modern developments, ensures the creation of a highly effective integrated defense system against weaponswhich is not at all inferior to the American national and European missile defense.
Dialogue with the West on this topic is terminated. This conclusion was reached by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation after the organizers of the international conference on missile defense, held in mid-June in the German city of Mainz, refused to accept Russia's application for participation in the event. According to the information from Smolensk Square, the reason for the demarche is called “recently appeared various difficulties”, which will not allow creating “proper conditions for the reception of Russian guests”.
Short acquaintance
The Foreign Ministry of the Russian Federation stressed that this step fits into the general line on curtailing the dialogue with Russia on missile defense, which has recently been carried out by the United States and its NATO allies. A statement by the office of Sergei Lavrov says: “Such an ostrich approach cannot but cause concern in conditions when the unrestricted deployment of elements of the US-NATO missile defense system is actively continuing in Europe. This is fraught with a breach of strategic balance and undermining international stability. ”
“The development of the Skif combat space station with anti-satellite laser weapons was carried out in the strictest secrecy”
The current turn of the Anti-State with the USA and the whole West began 12 years ago, when 13 of June 2002 of the year went down in history The Treaty on the Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Defense Systems, signed in May of 1972. The then President George Bush called this document a relic of the Cold War and said: "As commander in chief of the US armed forces, I cannot allow the United States to remain parties to a treaty that prevents us from developing effective self-defense systems."
Since then, the passions over the deployment of this self-defense only increased, especially since in the present version it has a pronounced American-European character. Moscow immediately appreciated the opportunity to influence the global anti-missile initiative precisely through Washington’s desire to tie Europe to this program, deploy a unified missile defense system, which, however, will be divided into national - American with positional areas, in particular in California and Alaska, and the European (TMD).
In 2003, the Russia-NATO Council formed an ad hoc working group on theater missile defense to analyze the interoperability and approbation of joint tactics and related procedures. Beginning with 2004, for this purpose, the corresponding Russia-NATO command and staff exercises (CCR) for regional missile defense were conducted.
But the collaboration ended at the beginning of 2008, when the fourth CSR was carried out. At the height of the exercises, Czech Prime Minister Miroslav Topolanek and American General Henry Obering stated in unison that elements of the overseas missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic would become an integral part of the NATO system. Moreover, a few months earlier, in November 2007, Chief of the General Staff, Army General Yuri Baluyevsky openly warned Western partners: Russia would refuse to participate in the joint theater missile defense project if the Americans tried to combine missile defense systems on both sides of the Atlantic, deploying ten anti-missiles in Poland and one providing radar in the Czech Republic.
In the 2010 year, at the NATO summit in Lisbon, both sides nevertheless agreed to cooperate on European missile defense, but the negotiations quickly reached an impasse due to the fact that our country demanded to provide legal guarantees of non-directionality of the system against Russia. Washington in every way convinced that the system was being created in Europe to counter the threats of Iran and the DPRK, and categorically refused to document the assurances.
In October last year, speaking in Brussels after the meeting of the Russia-NATO Council at the level of defense ministers, Sergei Shoigu said that the joint work is failing because the West does not take into account Russian concerns. “We lack predictability regarding the US and NATO missile defense plans,” the head of the Russian military department regretted.
A complex approach
Speaking at the Ministry of Defense collegium in January of this year, Sergei Shoigu stressed that in recent years new challenges and threats to Russia's military security have emerged: the deployment of a global missile defense system and the deployment of its components near Russian borders, the creation of new effective means of precision weapons in conventional equipment, militarization outer space. It is necessary to take retaliatory measures, the minister stated.
For the first time, the military leadership of Russia assigned such a high status to American plans. Moreover, it is missile defense that is the main irritant in this case, since from a military-technical point of view, complex anti-missile programs are unthinkable in principle without orbital reconnaissance, target designation and defense means along with high-precision firing complexes, both land-based and aerospace-based.
Today it is difficult to accept the fact that the Russian leadership pays little attention to defense against aerospace attack weapons. For this purpose, in the 2011 year, by order of the then President Dmitry Medvedev, the Aerospace Defense Forces (ASD) were created, based on the Space Forces, which appeared in the 50s. Now they include, in particular, the formation of missile defense and control of outer space.
The creation of a unified anti-missile and air defense system, designed to unite not only our own, but also the national systems of allies in the CIS, Russia has been engaged since 2008. This means a gradual erasure of the boundary between tactical and strategic air defense and missile defense. The Russian concept involves the creation of a multi-layered and multi-level air defense / missile defense system capable of hitting air targets at different distances and heights. It will include short-range complexes: “Tunguska”, “Tor-M2”, “Pantsir-S”, “Buk” and “Morfey”, medium-range: C-300 and “Vityaz”, long-range: C-400, C -500, A-235.
At the beginning of 2011, Nikolai Makarov, then occupying the post of Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, announced that the new missile defense system would actually become an umbrella that would close the country from ballistic attacks, medium-range missiles, from various types of cruise missiles - air, sea, land, including from extremely small heights at any time, in any situation.
Nevertheless, the main means of aerospace defense, capable of withstanding intercontinental (ICBM) and medium-range missiles (MRBD), will be the promising C-500 and the modernized missile defense system of Moscow A-235, and the last line - active protection complexes. According to statements by the military, a multi-layer missile defense system will ensure the security of not only the capital region, but also important (for example, industrial) facilities in the rest of Russia.
About C-500 is now little known. The main purpose of the complex is to defeat the warheads of medium and long range ballistic missiles in the final segment of the trajectory. It will be supplied with radars capable of detecting targets at a distance of up to 900 kilometers.
“With regard to the promising C-500 air defense systems, to which the EKR Troops pin special hopes, at the moment its developer has already manufactured separate means of the system and has begun to test them. The work as a whole is planned to be completed in the near future, and the first serial model should go to the troops in a few years. The aerospace defense forces constantly monitor the process of creating a new system. In total, five sets of C-500 are planned to be purchased as part of the State Armaments Program, ”commander of the EKR Lieutenant-General Alexander Golovko noted.
Lieutenant-General Viktor Bondarev, Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Air Force, spoke about the combat capabilities of the promising complex at the end of 2012. According to him, he is able to simultaneously hit up to ten ballistic targets, including the combat units of hypersonic cruise missiles. At the same time, the speed of intercepted targets can reach 7000 meters per second. For comparison: the first cosmic velocity, that is, necessary to bring an object into a circular orbit of the Earth, is 7900 meters per second. The new anti-aircraft complex will use the principle of separate solutions for the destruction of ballistic and aerodynamic targets.
Bondarev also said that C-500 will outperform both Russian C-400 and American MIM-104F Patriot PAC-3 in its capabilities. At the same time, the complex will be used for anti-aircraft and anti-missile cover of large regions, industrial and strategic facilities, it is unified with the existing anti-missile defense system of Moscow А-135, and therefore, with promising А-235.
Experimental and combat training trials of the Moscow ABM A-235 began in the 2013 year. According to preliminary data, this multichannel system will receive the upgraded 53Т6 interceptor missiles currently used in the A-135 system. Anti-missiles of the new system will be able to carry both kinetic and nuclear warheads.
The contract for its creation was signed in 1991 year. Probably, A-235 will receive the Elbrus-3М supercomputer, the Don-2Н radar station and two echelon anti-missiles of a large and medium range. All key parameters of the perspective system are classified, but it can be assumed that C-500 will be able, in particular, to exchange data with А-235, which will improve the accuracy of hitting targets.
The continuity of generations
The USSR and Russia remain so far the only states that have managed to adopt an effective missile defense system. In 1954, according to a special government decree, large-scale work began in the Soviet Union, which was by no means based on an empty place. By that time, the team created by Stalin KB-1 had already successfully solved the task of deploying an almost impenetrable anti-aircraft defense of Moscow. That system, designated C-25, could reflect a "star" (simultaneous from all directions) raid, three times superior to the one that at the end of World War II, the Anglo-American aviation wiped off the face of the earth Dresden.
In 1955, the chief designer of the Special KB-30, Grigory Kisunko, who later became the general designer of the Soviet missile defense system, proposed a bold program of an experimental missile defense system “A”. The innovation was that the scientist intended to use a fundamentally new method for determining the coordinates of a high-speed ballistic target and an interceptor missile, the so-called triangulation. 26 of March (according to other data - 4 of March) 1961-th at a distance of more than 100 kilometers and height of 25 kilometers of missile missile was destroyed by MRSD P-5 with 500 kilograms of TNT launched from the Kapustin Yar test site. In passing, we note that in the US, the same indicator was achieved only after 23.
The 9 of June of the same year intercepted a more powerful MRSD P-12, which flew at a speed of three kilometers per second, as a result of which its warhead was destroyed. In a report to the government it was reported: "... At the command of the computer, the fragmentation-combat unit of the antimissile was undermined, after which, according to the cinema and photo registration, the head part of the ballistic missile began to fall apart."
In the same year, tests of the B-1000 (Р2TA) missile with a nuclear free warhead developed in Chelyabinsk-70 were tested. A direct defeat of the head parts of ballistic missiles was recorded in a number of subsequent tests. In total, the 11 interceptor missiles were launched to intercept ballistic targets. For the first time in the world of anti-missile missiles reached a speed of more than a thousand meters per second (that is, more than three speeds of sound or faster than the speed of a bullet fired from an AKM Kalashnikov assault rifle - 900 m / s), which was an epochal achievement at that time. As a method of guidance, a parallel approach of the antimissile and targets in a strictly oncoming course was chosen.
From the very beginning, the idea of missile defense was hampered by the enormity of the tasks that were prescribed. After all, even three years before the first test success in intercepting the head part of a ballistic missile in the spring of 1961, the CPSU Central Committee issued a resolution on the creation of a full-scale A-35 PRO in the entire Moscow region. The task of covering the entire country was set before the start of the A-35 flight tests. In the end, this raw system was adopted only in the summer of the 1971.
Apparently, it was the assault and the ambiguity of plans for the domestic anti-missile program that brought the development of means for overcoming the missile defense itself to the first place and allowed Russia to take a leading position in this direction by the beginning of the new millennium. Immediately after the aforementioned missile defense tests in 1961, the then leader of the USSR, Nikita Khrushchev, bluffing, said: "Our rocket, one might say, gets into a fly in space." Then Kisunko decided to force work on fairly cheap means of overcoming missile defense. These included the radio-absorbing coatings of missile heads, false targets and active jamming stations.
The “Cactus” product was a shell based on semiconductor films or spinous, like a desert plant, structure. Such a coating applied to the head of the rocket, many times reduced its radar cross section.
False targets of the inflatable type “Willow” are cassettes with a package of dipole reflectors made of synthetic metallized film that was shot in space. The reflectors were inflated by the amount of air that remained in them during the packaging. Active jamming equipment - the Mole station was designed for issuing noise packages for each probe pulse of an enemy locator. Designers have developed and successfully tested the station to counter radar early-detection of targets and counter-firing radar targeting enemy missiles.
Another derivative of missile defense should be considered the development of anti-satellite weapons. The fact is that Grigori Kisunko had an ardent rival - Vladimir Chelomey, General Designer of the OKB-52, who in 1959 proposed a program to combat the enemy’s artificial satellites, and did everything possible to replace the new missile defense project. It must be said that an event played Chelomeyu’s hands, which became, without exaggeration, the true military triumph of the USSR.
1 May 1960, the new C-75 anti-aircraft missile complex finally reached the Lockheed U-2, an American high-altitude photo-reconnaissance aircraft, approaching the Urals, which was still flying with impunity to the Soviet MiG interceptors. Pictures of Francis Powers, who escaped and captured, flew around the world against the background of the wreckage of his plane.
The leadership of the USSR reasonably suggested that now the United States in collecting intelligence is reorienting to the widespread use of spy satellites. Using connections with the country's leadership, Vladimir Chelomey achieved complete domination of the anti-satellite direction. Moreover, Grigory Kisunko got Chelomey under a special order, which did not add to the pace of the missile defense work. By the way, Khrushchev, whose spontaneous, ill-considered actions more than once brought the world to the brink of war, and his own country to the brink of economic collapse, 1960 announced in June that any reconnaissance satellite over the territory of the USSR would be shot down.
If the unlucky Powers was already exchanged in February 1962 in Berlin on the Glínicke Bridge for the Soviet intelligence officer William Fischer (Rudolf Abel), he did not intend to exchange money on strategic armaments. Although Chelomey's Fighter of Satellite program was completely separate from missile defense, did not use its groundwork, in particular for radar support, the Soviet government decided to force both directions at the expense of enormous material costs.
As a result, both the missile defense system and the unique combat space station codenamed “Skif” with anti-satellite laser weapons appeared. Despite the fact that in August 1983, the then leader Yuri Andropov made a sensational statement about the cessation in the USSR of all work on space weapons, in an atmosphere of the strictest secrecy, Salyut Design Bureau continued the development of Skif.
It was decided to test the station during the first launch of the most powerful launch vehicle Energia in May of 1987. And again they were not exchanged for trifles, but they planned to launch a combat model right away, but without expensive armament. In the traditional Soviet rush and assault area, the 80-ton 37-meter station, which received the name Polyus for the media, was mounted on a carrier, and 15 was launched in May. The control system that failed at the de-launching stage did not turn on the propulsion system of the station in time, which as a result fell into the Pacific Ocean. After that, Mikhail Gorbachev decided to abandon further work on the "Skiff". However, the very idea of orbital combat complexes, historically close to the national anti-missile and anti-space defense, has not gone away anywhere and is waiting in the wings for implementation.
Information