Soviet Russia had plans for own Star Wars system

Air Space Mag

According to Soviet space scholar Asif Siddiqi, a historian at Fordham University in New York City, Moscow began working on space-based weapons well before Reagan kicked the U.S. program into high gear with his March 23, 1983 Star Wars speech. "[The Soviets] funded two massive R&D studies in the late 1970s and early 1980s to explore how to counter imaginary American missile defense ideas," he says. Two concepts emerged: Skif—a laser "cannon" in orbit—and another weapon known as Kaskad (Cascade), designed to destroy an enemy's satellites with missiles fired from another craft in orbit.