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U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE 

DIRECTOR OF INTELLIGENCE AND RESEARc# 

\k■ 

,„ 

,,,,, .04'1 ' To The Secretary 

c. 

 K. . Policy: 18 Points 

• Through: S/S c, Policy: Peaceful Uses 

From : INR - Thomas L. HughesUM401"1 Policy: Space Law 

Subject:' Soviet Criticism of the US MOL Program Policy: MOL 

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81 

RSB-119, October 19, 1965 

A review of Soviet reactions to the President's August 25 

announcement of the US manned orbital laboratory (MOL) program 

suggests that Soviet criticism is likely to continue, but that 

Moscow does not intend to overstep certain self-imposed limits,-"' 

ABSTRACT 

Moscow has issued a sustainer. series of criticisms of theAmerican MOL program, but there has never been a high volume of 

propaganda on the subject. The Soviets have not criticized the 

concept of,, a manned orbital laboratory as such. On the contrary., 

they have reiterated their intention to launch one of their own. 

The Soviets have taken advantage of the circumstance that .- 

t j have never drawn a public distin::1.;ion between the civilian 

and military aspects of their own space program to charge that the 

-fl program under the Air Force, rather than NASA, marks a new stage 

r. American militarization of its space effort. 

In private conversations, Soviets at the UN have expressed 

concern over the MOL program and its implicationsjor American 

. 

policy. But they have not mentioned the .hit thelrformal 

speeches. 7g0 

1. This review is a follow-u:_ to Research Memorandum. RES-250 

"World Reactions to the MOL Announcement," October 12, 1965 (LIMITED 

OFFICIAL USE), amm 3 

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The charge that the American MOL will engage in spying has 

been used in all of the commentaries as an illustration of the. . 

military missions to be performed. However, none of the Soviet 

commentaries revives the old Soviet argument that spaceborne 

'reconnaissance is illegal -- the question of legal aspects of 

spaceborne reconnaissance is simply not addressed, presumably to 

avoid legal generalizations which might apply to their own spaceborne reconnaissance. One writer, Deputy Commander of the Soviet 

strategic rocket forces Tolubko, charged that MOL would be a step"; • t` 

..;., 

in the direction of developing an orbital weapons,system: This. 

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charge has not been repeated in subsequent commentaries, even :- 

though US press stories could have been used as a peg. - And the 

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Soviets seem to have backed off from charges that questions had 

arisen about American intentions with respect to nonorbiting of 

weapons of mass destruction, lest they provoke an exchange of 

charges which might embarrass them. 

In terms of volume and tone, Moscow could hardly have been 

expected to say less when presented with a target of opportunity 

during a period when East-West tensions were running high. Conti_xing commentaries suggest that the proposition that MOL 

represents a thrust of the American military into the cosmos is 

'..oming a staple of Soviet propaganda destined for sustained 

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ment than with the long-anticipated US MOL progagLasaotenIla7: 

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repetition. However, the Soviet reaction has not on the whole 

been characterized by a sense of urgency or alarm. For the 

moment, at least, Moscow seems to be more acutely. concerned with 

the ins and. outs of political exploitation of the US announce-. 

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Initial Reaction 

Moscow was not instantly critical of the President's August 

.25 announcement of the US MOL program, but moved quickly to . 

exploit commentaries in the American press. The initial Soviet 

coverage of President Johnson's announcement was a TASS news 

report which summarized what he said in a straightforward fashion. 

Indeed, because it was an objective summary, the first TASS item 

put the President in a better light than he had appeared in Soviet 

media for some weeks before or since. But the halcyon moment was 

not destined to last. Even before the President's announcement, 

Soviet propaganda was already attacking alleged military aspects 

of the Gemini-5 flight which was under way. Accusations that the 

Gemini-5 was engaged in reconnaissance missions had been leveled 

in Soviet media even before the American reports that the 

astronauts had observed a missile launching were published, and 

on the very day of the President's announcement Red Star carried 

a long article detailing the allegation that Gemini-5 was engaged 

in reconnaissance. Soviet editors were already zeroing in on US . 

space programs -- presumably because of general tensions over 

Vietnam and perhaps with some effort to stigmatize American 

tracking facilities in foreign countries -- and the Soviets were 

quick to seize upon the Beecher story in the Wall Street Journal 

as a source of illustration for the charge that the US was 

engaging in a militarization of its space effort. 

No Attack on MOL's Per Se 

Moscow has not at any point attacked the concept of manned 

orbital laboratories as such. On the contrary, Soviet officials 

have reaffirmed the Soviet Union's intention to have a MOL of its 

own. Soviet cosmonaut Leonov at an international meeting in 

Athens on September 16 talked about Soviet plans for an orbiting 

laboratory (something the Soviets have been alluding to on and 

off since 1962), and the leader of a delegation of Soviet space 

experts, Gorbanev, mentioned Soviet MOL plans in Tokyo on the 

same day. 

The US announcement was, of course, noted in the American 

press as a departure from NASA or civilian control of manned space 

ve'tures to Air Force management of the MOL project. And since 

the USSR had never drawn any distinctions as to what parts Of its 

seace programs were military or civilian, Moscow apparently 

felt that It was in a position to exploit the American move as 

part of its general denigration of American militarism. 

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Military Mistlions 

Articles like Beecher's also provided Soviet commentators 

with the material with which to document a small but continuing 

series of articles depicting the MOL program as a symptom of 

American militarism. The charge has been documented by listings. 

of military missions for MOL drawn from American press stories. 

Navigation, communications, interception of spacecraft, and anti-. 

submarine warfare have been mentioned, but the one charge common 

to all of the Soviet commentaries to date has been that MOL is 

intended for reconnaissance. 

Space Reconnaissance 

While Moscow's accusations that Gemini-5 and MOL had as part 

of their mission spying conveyed the message that American use of 

space for reconnaissance was undesirable, Soviet commentaries have 

stopped just short of explicitly reviving Moscow's old argument: , 

that space reconnaissance was illegal. Evidently, now that 

Moscow has a satellite reconnaissance program of its own under 

way (it does not discuss publicly the reconnaissance mission of 

certain Cosmos series satellites), it is reluctant to reiterate:. 

contentions about, illegality that would apply to Soviet programs. 

Since the 1963 UN General Assembly Soviet publidsts have 

gradually played down Moscow's contention that satellite 

reconnaissance is illegal. Moscow did not abandon its legal 

bri3f against satellite reconnaissance when it agreed to the 

October 17, 1963 UN resolution on legal principles for space 

activities; it merely accepted a widest-area-of-agreement approach, 

accepting such principles as were agreed but reserving its position 

on still-disputed issues. Since then, however, Moscow has given 

less emphasis to its legal case, and the most recent Soviet overview of the subject of space law -- in an interview in Red Star 

in August -- did not make any specific reference to the Soviet 

argument that space reconnaissance is illegal. Moscow has never 

publicly affirmed the contrary proposition -- that space obser-

\, - tion is legal -- and Khrushchev's private statements tending 

1ln that direction have never been reaffirmed by his successors. 

However, continued silence on the legal aspect of the matter. in 

connection with MOL suggests that Moscow's tendency increasingly. 

to accept space reconnaissance as a fact of life continues. 

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Orbital Bombardment 

Only one of the Soviet commentaries raised the charge that 

the US might be on the threshold of'developing an orbital bombardment system which would violate the UN resolution against 

putting weapons of mass destruction into orbit. In number 37 

of the weekly Life Abroad, Col. Gen. Tolubko, deputy chief of 

the Soviet strategic rocket forces, cited a statement from the 

West German newspaper Die Welt that a MOL could be used as a 

platform from which to drop bombs. He then went on to suggest 

that the US program was aimed at developing an orbital nuclear 

bombardment system which would lead to violation of the October 

1963 UN resolution. Perhaps Tolubko was arguing in an internal 

debate for some space weapons program of hiscwn (conceivably an 

interceptor for hostile satellites). Be that as it may, his 

accusation was not followed up in subsequent commentaries, and 

none has mentioned the subject of orbital bombardment systems. 

We suspect that the principal reason for backing away from_: 

the orbital bombardment theme may be Soviet reluctance to open a 

debate in which Moscow might be on shaky ground. For Brezhnev is 

on record with a claim -- which US intelligence does not credit 

as valid -- that the Soviet Union possess an orbital bombardment 

system. In his July 3, 1965 speech to military graduates he 

stated that the USSR had "orbital rockets" (a different term ). 

from Khrushehev's "global" missiles). The next day a Soviet 

propaganda broadcast described "orbital rockets" as ones which, 

are eII shot into a terrestrial orbit from where they are capable 

of hitting any target on earth when needed" -- i.e., in terms 

which describe an orbital bombardment system. 

Brezhnev's statement and the subsequent propaganda broadcast, 

if taken at face value as evidence that the USSR had developed an 

orbital bombardment system, would not per se constitute a 

violation of the operative paragraph (2) of the October 17, 1963 

UN resolution. But they would call into question the US-Soviet 

exchange of intentions described in paragraph (1) of that resolution'. Since President Johnson in his August 25 statement had 

made a point of reaffirming the US intention not to orbit weapons 

of mass destruction, Moscow may have preferred not to elicit a 

discussion of Brezhnev's odd remark and its possible bearing on,. 

the question of intentions with respect to the UN resolution.4', 

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14. 

At the UN --:The General and the Military 

At the UN Outer Space Committee session, the Soviets did 

not publicly mention the MOL. But in his bilateral talks with 

NASA officials, Soviet representative Blagonravov cautioned on 

October 6 that the current political atmosphere would tend to 

limit the.scope of new US-Soviet cooperation in space, and cited 

the American MOL program as contributing to Soviet apprehension. 

A Soviet Foreign Ministry officer attached to the Soviet dele-. 

gation in New York, Stashevsky, elaborated on the point in a 

conversation with an American officer. Stashevsky said he wished 

to convey the serious apprehension with which the Soviet scientific community viewed not only the MOL project, but the form in 

which it was announced. He could not, he said, understand why 

it was necessary for the President himself to present the plan. 

It may well be that Blagonravov, who negotiated the original 

agreement on US-Soviet bilateral space cooperation, is sincere in 

his expression of concern lest the MOL announcement represent 

decline in American interest in nonmilitary aspects of space 

exploration. But even so, there was a touch of irony in his being 

the man to carry that message. For Blagonravov holds a commission 

as Lieutenant General of artillery and in his pre-space days wasbest known for his Stalin-prize-winning textbook on automatic 

weapons. In the'flurry of commentary over the American MOL pro?. 

.gram, he "seemed to forget that military participation in the. 

Soviet space program has so long been standard practice. 

Conclusions 

As a matter of public posture, Moscow was already casting 

about for opportunities to denigrate American space activities 

when the American announcement of the MOL program was made. It. 

was hardly to be expected that the Soviets would fail to attack 

an obvious target of opportunity. The sustained nature of the 

Soviet commentary on the subject suggests that these attacks are 

likely to continue. The charge that the American MOL program 

represents a new stage in American militarism's efforts to 

exploit outer space seems destined to remain as a staple of Soviet 

propaganda. Since they have never drawn a public distinction 

between the military and civilian portions of their own space 

program, the Soviets seem to feel that they are in an advantageous 

position to play up the distinction between NASA and Air'Force 

management of the American MOL program. 

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However, Moscow's treatment of the subject, both in public 

and in private, suggests that Soviet concern over the policy 

_implications of the US announcement is relatively limited. 

Blagonravov was probably sincere, if disingenuous, in expressing 

concern over the implications of the MOL announcement for USSoviet cooperation in space. Blagonravov has long been.• 

interested in such cooperation and is presumably sensitive to 

developments which might make the work of getting approval in 

Moscow for his proposals and projects more difficult. Neverthe-. 

less, neither the MOL announcement nor the general political 

atmosphere characterized by tensions over Vietnam prevented 

Blagonravov from concluding some modest agreements with US officials in New York in early October for continued US-Soviet 

cooperation in space technology. 

As for the broader implications of the US announcement for 

Soviet strategic posture, Moscow appears to have taken the US 

announcement in stride as a long-anticipated development. General 

Tolubko expressed concern over the potential of MOL to serve as- a: 

step in the development of an orbital bombardment system, and may 

have been trying to use the MOL announcement as a justification 

for advocating some military program of his own. Others whom we':, 

do not know about may be using it in this manner in private. 

• '`. 

If Moscow's Statements indicate possible concern over . 

.American use of space for reconnaissance, avoidance of old Soviet 

arguments about the illegality of space reconnaissance suggests, 

that the Soviets are more interested in protecting their own '`-

satellite reconnaissance program than in trying to stigmatize 

• satellite reconnaissance as such. References to other possible. 

military missions seem to be merely citations of those mentioned 

in the American press for the purpose of stressing the military 

nature of the US program, but without any special treatment about 

implications for the USSR. 

While Moscow may be concerned over strategic implications of 

such potential MOL applications as reconnaissance or orbital bombardment, the Soviet reaction has not on the whole been characterized by a sense of urgency or alarm. On the contrary, Soviet 

statements have been notable for their restraint, on specific key 

issues and for moderation in the amount and kind of attention 

which has been paid to the US announcement. * 

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In sum,:for the moment at least Moscow seems to be more 

acutely concerned with the ins and outs of political exploitation of the US announcement than with the long-anticipated 

American MOL program as a potential strategic threat. For 

whatever Moscow's concerns over possible strategic implications 

may bej.they.were long inherent in the possibility;of a MOLr 

and not basically altered by the President's announcement. 

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