May 2 1977
From The Space Library
Aviation-Week reported that a controversy within the U. S. intelligence community had kept the U.S. National Security Council and the president from learning that the USSR had developed a directed energy weapon designed to destroy U.S. intercontinental and submarine launched ballistic missile nuclear warheads. (Directed-energy weapons was a term coined to include both laser beam weapons and high energy lasers.) Events that convinced some U.S. analysts that USSR weapons were nearing prototype test stage included; -Detection by a USAF early-warning system of large amounts of gaseous hydrogen in the upper atmosphere with traces of tritium, considered relics of charged particle beam device tests carried out since 1975 at Semipalatinsk.
USSR ground tests of a small high energy laser destined for spacecraft launch, possibly related to manned space station activities.
Tests of a new magnetohydrodynamic generator to provide power for a charged particle beam system near the Caspian Sea, monitored by a TRW early-warning satellite stationed over the Indian Ocean. Establishment of a new test site at Azghir, the Caspian Sea location, under direct control of the USSR national air defense force.
Confirmation by a USAF-sponsored team of U.S. physicists and engineers that the USSR had achieved success in 7 areas of high energy physics needed to develop a beam weapon.
Admission by previously unconvinced U.S. physicists that the USSR could have developed the technology for a charged particle beam device. Hints by a visiting Soviet physicist last summer that the USSR was far ahead of the U.S. in controlling fusion by compression of small pellets of thermal nuclear fuel, and thus in potential weapons based on fusion technology. The information given by Leonid 1. Rudakov during his visit to the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory had later been classified top secret by DOD and ERDA.
Maj. Gen. George J. Keegan (USAF, Ret.), former head of Air Force intelligence, had in 1975 reported to CIA head William Colby on Soviet beam technology; the CIA's nuclear intelligence panel had written a report, no cony of which was ever given to USAF intelligence.
Av WK said Colby just before a meeting on strategic arms limitation had notified then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger of a Soviet facility "related to nuclear functions that were unknown"; except for that, no mention of the beam weapon potential had ever been made to the president, the secretary of state, or the National Security Council. Av WK also charged that influential U.S. physicists had sought to discredit Gen. Keegan's report, their general attitude being that "if the U.S. could not successfully produce the technology to have a beam weapon, the Russians certainly could not." (Av WK, May 2/77, 16)
The next issue of Av WK quoted President Jimmy Carter's reply to a query from the Washington Post's Dave Broder on the report of a Soviet breakthrough in high energy weapons: ". . . Is there any such development and does it threaten the U.S. strategic deterrence?" Carter replied: "We have no evidence, Dave, that the Soviets have achieved any major breakthrough in the kind of weapon described ... the assessment of the report in the aviation magazine has been exaggerated." (Av WK, May 9/77, 13)
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