A key individual in the development and design of Russia’s Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle told TASS in an interview published on Oct. 6 that development work on it actually began in the mid-1980s in response to President Ronald Reagan’s SDI policy. “After all-embracing considerations, the proposal of the Research and Production Association of Machine-Building began to be implemented in 1985,” said Gerbert Yefremov, Company Honorary CEO and Honorary Chief Designer of the Research and Production Association of Machine-Building (now part of Tactical Missiles Corporation), responding to a question about how and when the work on the Avangard hypersonic missile system proceeded.
Not mentioned by Yefremov is the critical fact that Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov rejected the 1983 Reagan/LaRouche offer for joint development for a beam-weapons-based anti-missile system, which would have made existing missile systems technologically obsolete. Once such a joint SDI was off the table, the Soviets apparently turned to develop the Avangard, and possibly other systems. Yefremov may or may not be aware of this critical feature of the matter.
The U.S. anti-ballistic missile defense coupled with massively deployed nuclear-tipped strike missiles reinforces the American combat potential, Yefremov continued. The simultaneous possession of the capabilities for delivering a pre-emptive massive nuclear strike and the systems for intercepting the few remaining enemy missiles becomes destabilizing and inflames tensions in the world, he argued. “I can say that Reagan’s SDI alarmed the leadership of the Soviet Union,” he recalled. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the U.S.S.R. Council of Ministers issued a resolution, instructing defense enterprises to put forward proposals on measures in response to the U.S. SDI program, the chief designer said.
In response to that resolution, Yefremov said that he “sent a proposal on practically implementing a very difficult task of making the classical ABM defense system intended for countering ballistic missiles useless.” “The experimental testing, both ground, bench and flight tests, using UR-100N UTTKh missiles (NATO designation SS-19), continued until the early 2000s. Further practical trials that already involved a combat system proceeded under the direct control of President [Vladimir] Putin after the US withdrew from the ABM Treaty in 2002,” he said.
