Who is on the dark side? Not the Soviets.
Space Shuttle Columbia is among Darth Vader’s Galactic Fleet.
Why was this on their mind? The prior year, President Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a space-based missile defense system, nicknamed Star Wars.
The text at the bottom translates to:
“USA: Strategy of space wars and cosmic terrorism”
“USA spends $15B per year to militarize space”
Some ironic context: the Soviets copied the Shuttle to the centimeter, and their Buran shuttle first rolled out in 1984. The Buran program was the largest and most expensive in Soviet space history, and it was originally designed as a military system for weapons delivery, even nuclear weapons. I posted details here: flic.kr/p/dFxFBv
The Blue text in the middle:
“Two ways of life, two politics”
And with the red headline:
“USSR: SPACE – PEACE!”
“The USSR proposes to ban the import of any kind of weapons into space to conclude a treaty on the banning of the use of force in outer space and from space towards the Earth.”
Up top we see the smiling Jedi Yuri Gagarin, and the purportedly science-focused Salyut space station. But in the 70’s, three of them were actually weaponized Almaz space stations with exterior mounted machine guns! The Soviets already flew weapons in space, and already fired a machine gun in space at a space target… practice for possible P2P battles to come. Such were the paranoias of the Cold War, coupled with the long tradition of the Russians to lie about everything. I have an Almaz periscope at work: flic.kr/p/2mzJUtP
The paragraphs under the headline:
“The USSR proposes to nuclear powers not to extend the nuclear arms race into new domains including outer space.”
The Soviet fears were in reaction to the early plans in the U.S. SDI program to use X-ray lasers powered by nuclear explosions. But that never materialized, and the US canceled the SDI program after Reagan left office.
Today, Darth Putin may become the first to violate their own proposal. This week’s WSJ headline: “Russia Launched Research Spacecraft for Antisatellite Nuclear Weapon Two Years Ago” (www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/russia-space-nuke-…)
Oh, the movie Star Wars was not allowed in the Soviet Union until 1990, six years after this poster was issued, yet the government tacitly acknowledges that most people had seen the banned film and were familiar with the plot and characters.
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