Soviets May Lead U.S. in ‘Star Wars’ : But Experts Believe Russia Lags Badly in Some Vital Areas

The Soviet Union, for all its insistence that the United States stop work on its Strategic Defense Initiative, has itself been studying exotic anti-missile technologies such as laser beams for a longer time and more intensively than the United States, according to available evidence.

The expert consensus is that the Soviets match or lead the United States in the basic technology of lasers and particle beams--and perhaps even in converting the exotic technology into weapons.

At the same time, however, it is believed they remain significantly behind in computers, sensors and other support equipment vital to constructing an effective space-based missile defense system.

Hurling Energy Bolts

The most alarmed U.S. officials fear that the Soviets have made breakthroughs that could soon lead to weapons not only for defending against enemy missiles but even for hurling offensive bolts of energy from space down to Earth.

Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard N. Perle insists that the Soviets oppose research on SDI, colloquially known as “Star Wars,” because they fear that the United States would stumble upon the same “offensive technologies” that they have found.

There is no evidence that space-based offensive weapons would be any more dangerous than Earth-based nuclear missiles. Yet Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev has said that the United States could use SDI weapons “against missiles, against satellites and against targets on Earth.”

‘Pulsed Power’

This much is known: Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency officials say Soviet scientists have been conducting concentrated research on so-called “pulsed power” since the late 1950s or early 1960s. Of the four exotic “Star Wars” technologies--lasers, particle beams, microwaves and kinetic energy devices--the first three use pulsed power, which consists of intense bursts of energy.

In 1965, Andrei D. Sakharov, the Soviet dissident and physicist who helped to develop the Soviet hydrogen bomb, wrote one of the first important papers on how to create such a powerful electrical discharge, much like a lightning bolt.

Recently released from internal exile, Sakharov said Reagan’s grand vision of a nationwide SDI umbrella against missiles was not technically feasible, but he criticized the Kremlin’s demand that the United States stop developing the new technology.

“The research has started, and not only in the United States but we may infer that in this country something is being done,” he added carefully in a statement that provided further support for the belief that Soviet scientists are conducting SDI-type experiments.

No Guarantee on Systems

Even if the Soviets succeed with the basic technologies in the laboratory, however, that does not guarantee that the concepts can be converted into anti-missile systems.

“Perhaps the biggest obstacles to Soviet success,” said Deputy CIA Director Robert M. Gates, “are remote sensors and computer technologies--currently more highly developed in the West than in the U.S.S.R.”

The congressional General Accounting Office, in a detailed 1982 study, estimated that the United States was five to 10 years ahead of the Soviets in the technologies related to turning lasers into weapons. These technologies include optical systems, early warning and target tracking sensors, microelectronics and data processing computers.

And what is true for lasers is probably true for the other exotic beam technologies as well, experts said.

Lasers, which emit powerful light beams that burn into their targets, appear to hold the greatest promise for use as weapons, U.S. experts say, and it is known the Soviets have made tangible progress in their development.

Impressive Achievements

“Soviet achievements are impressive,” Gates said. The Soviets, he said, have worked on three types of gas lasers--those using gases to produce the light beams--that the United States “considers promising for weapons applications.”

In addition, he said, the Soviets have continued working on “certain types of lasers which the United States abandoned” because of cost or other factors. He added that they have been working on “other types of lasers that the United States has not seriously considered for weapons application until very recently.” The CIA declined to identify the types.

Most of the results of the Soviet research have been kept secret. But in 1984, the Soviets reported an experiment in which a “free-electron” laser generated a beam of much greater intensity than the counterparts the United States has been researching, said Simon Kassel, a senior Rand Corp. engineer who specializes in Soviet research and development.

The free-electron laser--whose light is emitted when electrons change direction--is attractive both because it is particularly efficient in converting energy into light and because the light produced is of a frequency that passes more easily through air than the beams formed by most other lasers.

Gates said that in some cases, the Soviets have gone beyond research and have already built “ground-based lasers that could be used to interfere with U.S. satellites.”

Prepared for Next Step

The Soviets appear prepared to take the next step, of going into space first with anti-satellite weapons and then with anti-missile weapons, experts say. Gates said the Soviets “could have prototype space-based anti-satellite laser weapons by the early 1990s” and might deploy operational weapons of this kind in space before the year 2000.

He said they are expected “to test the feasibility of ground-based lasers for defense against ballistic missiles by the late 1980s and could begin testing components for a large-scale deployment system in the 1990s.”

In September, Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine, which often receives information leaked by the Pentagon, reported that an Air Force spy satellite photographed “two new, unusually large high-technology facilities under construction on mountain tops” in Soviet Tadzhikstan. Intelligence sources said “the facilities involve laser weapons,” the magazine reported, and “dwarf” comparable U.S. facilities.

Comparing U.S. and Soviet research is tricky. By one measure the Soviets, according to a Defense Department specialist, have between six and nine laser weapon prototypes at test ranges or laboratories, while the first U.S. laser of comparable power is only now being constructed at White Sands, N.M.

Generally, however, the Soviets tend to turn concepts into weapons earlier than the Americans. By contrast, one American expert noted, U.S. scientists focus on perfecting the sub-components and impose a higher standard of success on complete weapon systems from the start.

Proving Feasibility

The best comparison of Soviet and U.S. achievement in broadest terms is how close each is to proving the feasibility of using directed energy to destroy missiles, according to Kassel of the Rand Corp.

“The Soviets may be close to proving that,” he said, “while we are further away in some areas. But all this is pure speculation. We only know that if a technology is being studied for a long time, the accumulated experience--the resulting knowledge--must pay off.”

Experts say the Soviets have also been making strides in developing particle beams, which also have attractive features for use as weapons. Driven by electromagnetic fields akin to the acceleration process in atom-smashers, the beams are made up of electrons or larger sub-atomic particles that strike with greater impact than a laser beam, thus inflicting more damage.

Soviet scientists “may be able to test a prototype of a particle beam weapon intended to disrupt the electronics of satellites in the 1990s,” Gates said, and “a weapon designed to destroy satellites could follow later.”

A blue-ribbon panel of scientists convened by the Pentagon in 1979 concluded that the Soviets were five to seven years ahead of the United States in particle beam technology. This estimate has been challenged by some critics, but the consensus is that the Soviets do not lag in this field.

Microwave Beams

U.S. experts say the Soviets may also be ready to test in the 1990s a ground-based anti-satellite weapon using microwave beams, the third category of exotic weapon ideas in President Reagan’s SDI research program.

They said the Soviets have done extensive research on that technology, in which intense radio waves generated “fry” the electronics inside a missile much as a microwave oven is “tuned” to the frequency that heats water.

Soviet work in this area, compared with U.S. efforts, is “on a par, if not superior,” Gates said.

Long-range, space-based systems using the fourth SDI technology--kinetic energy weapons--probably will not be developed by the Soviets until the mid-1990s or later, Gates said.

Kinetic energy weapons are based on more conventional principles. Projectiles are propelled by explosives, as rockets are, or by electromagnetic fields.

100,000 M.P.H.

In the much-discussed “rail gun,” for example, metallic pellets are accelerated to enormous velocities by the attraction and repulsion of varying magnetic fields between two “rails.” Soviet experiments have achieved velocities of more than 100,000 m.p.h. in a vacuum, according to U.S. government documents.

The overall scope of the Soviet effort, according to U.S. officials, is considerably greater than that of the U.S. SDI program.

According to a joint report on Soviet strategic defense programs by the State and Defense Departments, the Kremlin’s SDI effort “represents a far greater investment of plant space, capital and manpower” than the comparable American program.

But such claims are viewed skeptically because they are used to support the Pentagon’s call for increased spending on the U.S. SDI program. Beyond that, they are based on indirect evidence at best.

For example, the State-Defense brochure claims that “over 10,000 scientists and engineers” work at more than a half-dozen major Soviet laser research and development facilities and test ranges. But that figure, according to experts, comes only from calculating the floor space under the roofs photographed by spy satellites and then dividing by the estimated space a Russian scientist might use.

Spending Claims

Similarly, claims about the amount of money that the Soviets are spending have been widely challenged. For several years, the Pentagon and the CIA said that the Soviet laser program, if conducted in the United States, would cost about $1 billion a year.

But a study by the Council on Economic Priorities, a “public service research organization” that has been critical of SDI, claims that the actual productive effort of the Soviet laser program is only about $370 million. There is no more firm evidence to support the critics’ view than the official U.S. estimates.

By comparison, U.S. funding for “directed energy beam research,” most of which goes to laser work, was $377 million in 1985 and has risen to $843 million appropriated for the 1987 fiscal year.

Aside from any funding disparities and the technical difficulties of making such weapons, there is considerable disagreement over whether there would ever be any practical offensive use for either the Soviet or the U.S. space-based weapons.

Perle contended that the Soviets “have discovered a potential for offensive uses of space that we haven’t yet discovered.” But other U.S. officials, including Kenneth L. Adelman, director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, say that is unlikely.

No Danger to Missile Silos

One U.S. specialist who asked not to be identified said that although lasers could be fired at the ground from space bases to start fires or blow up fuel dumps, “you couldn’t destroy missiles still in their hardened silos or in well-protected command centers.”

And using the precious fuel of the huge space-based weapons to start fires would be wasteful, he said. “Nuclear missiles launched from earth are far cheaper and more reliable ways of doing it.”

Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, Reagan’s national security adviser until he resigned last month, said at a White House briefing two months ago that “we spent a lot of time looking at” Soviet concerns that SDI weapons in space could strike targets on Earth.

“The physics of the matter doesn’t make that a realistic threat,” he said.

“Even with the largest type of laser that we’ve thought about, it would take something like a week to burn a city block,” he added. “That’s not a credible threat.”

Weather Factors

A detailed critique of SDI by Soviet scientists appears to confirm that point. The study, directed by Dr. Raoul Z. Sagdeev, chief of the Space Research Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, said that all of the possible uses of lasers against ground targets depended on favorable weather because clouds interfere with the beams’ penetration.

The possibility will always remain that any directed energy weapons in space could be used both offensively and defensively, in surprise attacks against key radars, early warning satellites and command centers, as well as in defense against retaliatory missile strikes.

But the Soviet scientists’ report said: “Even under suitable atmospheric conditions (when cloud cover and smoke are absent), space-based anti-missile defense laser systems are likely to have a limited field of use against ground targets.”