Americans Tour Soviet Military Laser Complex

A group of 10 Americans on Saturday toured a Soviet military laser research center previously considered central to the Soviet version of the U.S. anti-missile “Star Wars” program, according to reports published today.

The Americans, including two physicists, three members of Congress and two journalists, were the first foreigners allowed inside the Sary-Shagan complex, located in Soviet Central Asia, the New York Times said.

The tour included a look at a military laser once described by the Pentagon as an operable anti-satellite weapon. But the U.S. visitors concluded the laser is probably too weak to damage U.S. satellites.

“It seems to me it pretty clearly is not a power laser and doesn’t represent any threat as a weapon,” said Rep. Jim Olin (D-Va.), a former electrical engineer.

Sary-Shagan has been an object of U.S. interest since 1984, when the Pentagon published information about the compound based on satellite photographs and identified it as the heart of an “ominous” laser weapons research and development program, the paper said. It formed the heart of a campaign to justify President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative in 1985.

“It’s incredible to think that the Pentagon SDI folks probably got an extra $10 billion because of this place,” said Frank Von Hippel, a Princeton University physicist who toured the facility.

Earlier Saturday, the Soviet government told the delegation that it has decided to shut down all five nuclear reactors producing plutonium for nuclear arms at a secret plant in the Ural Mountains.