Soviet Union: Moscow’s Better Mousetrap

At the Soviet Union’s Sary-Shagan test range in the wilds of Kazakhstan, near the Mongolian border, a Galosh-type surface-to-air missile rose slowly from its launch pad. After climbing skyward, the rocket spread a dark, mile-wide cloud far above the lower atmosphere. It was a cloud that cast a shadow as far away as Washington. Last week U.S. intelligence sources reported that the test, conducted in September, involved a remarkable new anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system that could represent a major breakthrough.

Millions of Particles. The Moscow area has been ringed for the past four years by about 45 anti-missile rocket sites. But the latest test suggests that the Russians have now developed an ABM that employs the so-called asphalt-cloud concept. It could be installed before the U.S. has put any missile defenses of its own into operation.

All ABMs, including the proposed U.S. Safeguard system, work essentially the same way. High-speed rockets, usually nuclear-tipped, are exploded high above the atmosphere to damage or destroy incoming ICBMs. In the asphalt-cloud technique, the ABM disperses millions of particles in the path of enemy missiles. When the rockets plunge into the atmosphere, the highly combustible bits of asphalt that they have picked up ignite from frictional heat; the asphalt burns so rapidly and creates such great temperatures that the heat shields on the ICBMs are all but consumed. Then the missiles either burn up or are so deformed that they veer off course. U.S. officials say that no heat shield now in existence could survive the fiery ride through an asphalt cloud.

Installation of a cloud-type ABM system would be relatively simple and inexpensive for the Soviets. Many of their 10,000 surface-to-air missiles now deployed could be converted to ABM use. The Russians have already displayed their skill in spreading high-flying aerosols; in 1968, they blinded U.S. radar with a metallic “mist” during the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The U.S. has made only paper studies of cloud-type ABM systems, and as yet has no plans for any operational tests. Said a U.S. defense official of the Soviet system: “It’s one of those better mousetraps that appear to be working, and we don’t have anything like it in train, dammit.”

Stoking Fears. American strategists fear that the new Soviet capability could complicate the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT) with the Russians, due to resume in Helsinki next month. Moreover the intensive Russian experimentation comes at a time when Washington is becoming increasingly nervous about Moscow’s intentions in a number of areas—from Suez, where Soviet SA-2 and SA3 missiles have been emplaced in violation of the Mideast truce, to the Cuban sugar port of Cienfuegos, where Russian technicians are building a base capable of handling missile-carrying submarines.

Nor is that all that the Russians have done to stoke Washington’s fears. U.S. intelligence sources reported that the Soviets last week conducted another test of a key offensive weapon under the seemingly innocuous designation Cosmos 365. They sent aloft a giant S59 rocket, apparently carrying as its payload a mockup of an FOBS (for fractional orbital bombardment system), or space bomb, which could release its deadly cargo on virtually any terrestrial target. The U.S. has no such weapon and no defense against it.