Sebastien Roblin
After more than a half century of development, the U.S. military is finally close to fielding an array of laser weapons for defense against missiles, drones and small vehicles. However, the Soviet Union also researched laser weapons for decades, and developed an astounding variety of them, ranging from laser pistols, three different laser tanks and a laser-armed spaceship.
Lasers direct photons (light particles) into a coherent beam, and though most military lasers today are used to designate targets and measure distances and so forth, a sufficiently powerful laser can cause a destructive buildup of thermal energy. Depending on their design, lasers project may visible or invisible rays—the latter is typical for most combat lasers—though the point affected by a high-energy laser is likely to emit a visible effect.In theory, laser weapons could prove exceptionally accurate, fast hitting—it’s hard to beat the speed of light!—and inexpensive to shoot compared to a missile or cannon shell. Until recently, however, they have proven impractical due to the bulky power and cooling units they require, their limited range and difficulty in damaging well-shielded targets.
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.
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/russias-cold-war-super-weapon-put-lasers-everything-it-can-21553
