The Soviet Union began experimenting with lasers in the fifties and sixties. Its first laser weapons, emerging in the seventies, were fixed ground-based systems with the suitably science-fiction names Terra-3 and Omega. Terra-3 encompassed two different devices, installed at the Sary Shagan testing ground in Kazakhstan: a visible ruby laser and an invisible carbon-dioxide laser. Initially conceived in the 1960s to swat down ballistic missiles in the terminal descending phase, following the 1972 treaty banning antiballistic-missile systems, Terra-3 was reoriented towards damage orbiting satellites, though with little success due to inaccurate tracking systems.
Nonetheless, Terra-3 inspired the Pentagon to throw fits in the 1980s about a potential Soviet ?laser gap? over U.S. technology, and there were even rumors initiated by former Soviet officials (generally discredited today) that they were used to illuminate the space shuttle Challenger in 1984, causing it to malfunction. However, later Western inspection of Terra-3 revealed the lasers were mere prototypes that lacked by far the power and scale necessary to significantly affect orbital targets.
Russia's Cold War Super Weapon (Put Lasers on Everything It Can) | The National Interest Blog
Russia Is Building Laser-Armed Nuclear 'Combat Icebreakers'
More details are emerging about Russia?s trump card for control of the Arctic: laser-armed, nuclear-powered ?combat icebreakers.?
In addition to a warship-sized array of weapons, the 8,500-ton Ivan Papanin?class vessels will mount powerful lasers that can cut through ice?and possibly through enemies as well. They will join a fleet of forty existing Russian icebreakers. The United States is now down to two, even as the United States, Canada and other nations are focusing on the Arctic, where melting ice offer the lure of fresh mineral deposits and new commercial shipping routes.
And that?s where the lasers come in. ?Later this year, scientists aboard the Dixon, a Russian diesel-powered icebreaker operating in the White Sea, will begin testing of a 30-kilowatt ship-based laser, designed specifically for easing the movement of ships operating in the Arctic environment,? Sputnik News said. ?The project involves experts from the Moscow-based Astrofizika Design Institute, with the assistance of St. Petersburg's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute.?
It?s the following stages that will be interesting. As the United States discovered during its attempt fifteen years ago to create the YAL-1, a giant chemically powered antimissile laser mounted on a 747, a powerful laser has a powerful appetite for energy.
But that isn?t stopping Russia from trying to develop a two-hundred-kilowatt laser for its icebreakers (by comparison, the U.S. Army just took delivery of a truck-mounted antimissile laser with a power of just sixty kilowatts).
A laser powerful enough to cut through six feet of ice would probably prove equally formidable against missiles and drones, and perhaps even other ships. However, what?s really significant here isn?t the lasers. It?s the attention that Russia is paying to fighting in the Arctic, from icebreaker-warships to rugged antiaircraft missiles. That?s more than the United States is doing, and more than a small but Arctic-savvy nation like Canada can afford.
nationalinterest.org/blog/russia-building-laser-armed-nuclear-combat-icebreakers-21628