- Evidently, Soviet military planners were concerned enough about the potential of attacks on these vehicles to outfit them with an impressive suite of defensive equipment. Androsov says that concern stemmed from on-orbit rendezvous experiments in the Gemini program and the deployment of American ASAT systems in the 1960s. In reality, the US ASAT program was much smaller in scope than its Soviet counterpart. Plans for an Air Force co-orbital ASAT system called SAINT had been shelved in 1962 in favor of two ground-based direct-ascent systems that would use nuclear warheads to knock out enemy satellites in orbit. One was an Army project (Program 505) using Nike Zeus missiles from the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands chain in the Pacific. The other was an Air Force project (Program 437) relying on Thor missiles stationed on Johnston Island in the Pacific.
Although both programs saw a number of test launches in the 1960s, they had many drawbacks, one of them being that the nuclear blast would in all probability have crippled every other satellite, friendly or not, within a radius of several thousand kilometers. They also would have offered little or no protection against the Soviet Fractional Orbit Bombardment System (FOBS), a single-orbit nuclear weapon delivery system that was considered to be the main Soviet space-based threat against the US. Program 505 was canceled in 1966 and Program 437 was formally terminated in 1975, although it had lost most of its operational capacity after a hurricane hit Johnston Island in 1970.
The fact that the Russians spent significant resources on defending their military space stations shows that they either grossly overestimated the capabilities of these systems or had poor intelligence on future American ASAT systems. Sheer paranoia may also have come into play here, as it did in the 1976 decision to go ahead with Buran, the equivalent of the US Space Shuttle. That decision was largely driven by a twisted perception of the shuttle’s military potential.