Stopping Missiles in the Air: how the USSR lost the anti-aircraft warfare to the US

The high-level Ukrainian delegation conducts negotiations with the representatives of the Russian Federation on signing a "peace treaty" and ending the war. Documents with so-called "projects of agreements discussed by Ukraine and Russia" regularly appear in the media. The parties either refute the "leaks" or state that those were merely rough copies of certain stages of the negotiations.

Information of the British BBC of March 17, provided to the media by Ibrahim Kalin, the Counselor of the President of Turkey Recep Erdogan, is worth attention. He was present during a telephone conversation between Erdogan and Putin. The latter vocalized in person four lines that the delegations work along.

These are Ukraine's neutral status and its rejection of further NATO integration; demilitarization to the level that the Kremlin will find acceptable; protection of the Russian language in the territory of Ukraine; and "denazification." There were also demands concerning the status of the so-called DNR, LNR, and the Republic of Crimea – the talk was about Ukraine recognizing them.

On March 18, Medinsky, the head of the Russian delegation, stated that "Ukraine's neutral status and its non-joining NATO are the issues that Kyiv and Moscow had managed to achieve maximum coordination of their positions"; as to demilitarization, negotiation groups "are somewhere midway." "And from there, the nuances begin concerning security guarantees that Ukraine will get in addition to already existing should it refuse to join NATO," Medinsky added carelessly.

However, the entire world knows Ukraine is in negotiations with the country that is a pathological cheat and manipulator. There they approve violations of the signed international agreements on the highest level, and then the leadership is indignant when exposed and punished. And we don't just mean the Budapest Memorandum thrown into the trash – USSR applied the same practice to nuclear weapons and anti-missile defense.

Mind decided to remind how USSR tried to deceive the US back in 1970s – 1980s. Instead, it lost time, technology, and money essentially to fall behind the military and space areas forever. That is why Moscow is so frantically afraid of NATO's air and missile armor by its borders.

About trying to freeze ballistic missiles

On May 26, 1972, US President Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev signed several documents aimed at limiting strategic nuclear weapons. The most famous of these is the Interim Agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union on Some Measures to Limit Strategic Offensive Arms, the so-called ERUs.

The arms race that began after World War II required more and more money. In the late 1960s, the USSR produced only up to 200 heavy ballistic missiles a year, although the cost of armed uranium was 350 rubles per one (!!!) gram. And the average salary of an engineer was 120 rubles a month. It is unlikely that the United States had better accounting, so in 1969 the first negotiations on the reduction of nuclear weapons began in Helsinki.

In 1972, the parties finally reached a compromise: the United States and the Soviet Union froze the number of intercontinental surface-to-air ballistic missiles (ICB's range of 5,500 km – Mind) and submarine-launched ballistic missiles at the level specified in the protocol at the time of signing.

Neither side wanted to personally announce the exact numbers, how many and which missiles it has. So during the next consultations, they simply exchanged documents, where they wrote the number of missiles from the opponent. As history shows, both sides indicated the correct number of weapons in each other, that is, the intelligence of the countries worked well.

The final document on arms reduction and launchers, the so-called ERU-2, between the United States and the Soviet Union was signed on June 18, 1979 – http://www.armscontrol.ru/start/rus/docs/osv-2.txt. President Jimmy Carter was already signing.

As they tried to control missile defense (ABM) in 1972

Much more interesting was the agreement "On the limitation of missile defense systems." The countries agreed to have two ABM rings each: the first around the capitals (Moscow and Washington had them since the mid-1960s – Mind); the second is around the area where intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launchers are concentrated. The main thing is that in these areas within a radius of 150 km there were no more than 100 stationary missile defense systems.

In July 1972, the United States proposed reducing the missile defense area to one, and an annex was signed in the summer of 1974: The United States chose the Grand Forks military base in North Dakota, where the air force command is located and the main launchers are located, and the Soviet Union wanted to close Moscow.

In order for the missile defense to work properly, it needs a powerful system of early detection radar stations: the station detects the launch of the enemy missile, monitors its movement, transmits guidance coordinates to the ABM control point, and from there the projectile intercepts the missile.

Moscow said that it needed seven powerful radars around the perimeter of the empire. Four of them – the Dnipro radar with the possibility of better scanning, have already worked – in Mukachevo (Ukraine), in Skrunda (Latvia), in Balkhash (Kazakhstan), in the village of Mishelovka, Irkutsk, near Lake Baikal. They were planned to be modernized over time. But first, the USSR wanted to build three new radars, the Daryal series of progressive at the time.

Their locations were agreed with the United States and listed in the relevant protocol – "exclusively on the perimeter of the national territory": two on the Arctic coast of Russia, and one in southern Azerbaijan. the USSR honestly began building two – in the city of Pechora in the Arctic and in the city of Gabala in Azerbaijan. But with the third station – "Yeniseisk-15" – there was an annoying overlay.

Bad idea – bad implementation

Documents for the radar station near Yeniseysk construction got approval in 1980. Options of locating it near Norilsk or Yakutsk in compliance with the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty got dismissed because the erection of the "Pechora" radar station that began in 1974 in the arctic demonstrated how much dum it was to build "along the perimeter." So the General Staff of the USSR approved a decision to move the station southwards to the Krasnoyarsk region, 3000 km away from the perimeter of the sea border on the arctic shore.

Given the complexity of the logistics and the limited building season, construction on permafrost was worth three times as much as on the mainland. Besides, the station required a lot of electricity and water to maintain the climatic balance of the system. And there are problems with them in the arctic.

Instead, the powerful Yenisei Hydroelectric Power Plant already operated near Krasnoyarsk, producing almost free energy from the waters of Siberian rivers. Meanwhile, the "Daryal" radar station consumes resources that would cover a city with a population of 100 000 people.

In 1980, the erection of back then top-notch radar station "Daryal-U", station type 90H6 meters range, began in Yeniseisk-15 settlement. Two massive buildings 850 meters apart constituted the station. The first one, 80 m high and 30 by 40 meters antenna screen, was to transfer the data, and the second one, 100 m high and 80 by 80 meters screen – was to receive data.

"Daryal" radar station can simultaneously detect and follow 100 targets the size of a soccer ball from a 6000 km distance. And it registers up to 3000 targets like that every day. The authors of the station's design are the team of the Radioengineering Institute of the Academy of Science of the USSR under the supervision of Professor Vladimir Ivantsov.

However, hundreds of institutes and construction bureaus from all over the USSR participated in the project's practical implementation. Metallurgical plants produced thousands of tons of aluminum and copper wires; hundreds of kilograms of gold and silver were used for the contacts of the radio equipment. That does not include construction metals, concrete, bricks, glass, tiles... and the list can go on forever.

They abandoned themselves

In 1983, US satellites noticed an unusual construction in the Krasnoyarsk region, and methodically tracked it until 1987. In the end, the US government officially declared a violation of the USSR Article 6 of the ABM Treaty – the radar was built outside the "defined perimeter". At that time, the station had already been built, equipped and commissioning work began.
The union was trying to convince the United States that it was a space observation station and that countries could use it together. However, the United States abandoned this "legend" of the USSR, and in 1989 Moscow agreed to liquidate the Yeniseisk-15 radar station on its own.

According to official data: 203.6 million rubles were spent on the construction of the radar; for the purchase of technological equipment – 131.3 million rubles; and for its dismantling – 50 million rubles; 1,600 railway cars were needed to remove the unique equipment. The building itself with internal networks was left to chance. The turbulent 90s were ahead.

Hundreds of tons of aluminum and copper nets from two, almost a hundred meters of buildings, along with iron reinforcement, were pulled out by locals for a couple of decades and scrapped. Windows, doors, lamps, linoleum, switches – everything that could be disassembled and removed was disassembled and removed. Finally they reached the brick. The buildings were dismantled to the foundation.

This is what one of the flagships of Russia's missile defense system now looks like. These funds could have been spent on improving the lives of the Soviet people, but the "scoop regime" nullified the work of hundreds of thousands of scientists, engineers, metallurgists, railroad workers, builders, and related enterprises. Of the declared "powerful perimeter radars", only the Daryal radar in Pechora is currently operating. It will be 40 years old since its full launch (1984), and more than fifty local technologies.

How the United States took advantage of the failure of the USSR

The United States has drawn some conclusions from the Soviet Union's history of building powerful stationary radars: it is very expensive financially, requires too much energy and natural resources to function, and is being built for so long that the stations are becoming obsolete. Already in the late 1990s, the United States identified the main direction of development of the construction of small radars, which cover a large area of the network in convenient places for observation.

Pershing or Patriot missile systems are located near such stations. The strategy began to be actively implemented with the help of NATO countries. In 2001, during Bill Clinton's presidency, the United States unilaterally withdrew from the 1972 ABM Treaty.

This is what irritates Moscow, which is panicking about the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Russia loses to the West in terms of both military-technological and financial capabilities. Today, they flaunt their Dagger hypersonic missiles, which no radar can detect in the air. However, this is short-lived. The air defense systems already in place in NATO's European countries, including Poland, will quickly find algorithms for detecting and intercepting these missiles, thanks to the powerful development of technical thought in the West.

Russia fears that the latest air defense (missile) and anti-missile (missile) defense systems will appear in Ukraine, and our northern neighbor will be open to any surveillance. Instead, he is actively deploying his systems in satellite countries. For example, the Belarusian parliament recently ratified an agreement to place two Russian facilities on its territory for a period of 25 years: a missile attack warning system in Baranovichi and a naval radio station in Vileyka.

In general, the construction of the early detection radar "Volga" in Baranovichi began construction in 1986, then stopped, and resumed in 1997. It has been working there for 20 years, although using forty-year-old technology, its task is to detect medium-range missiles. The situation is very similar to the situation with the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Ukraine, ie Belarus will be on the hook, even after the departure of dictator Lukashenko.