Top Secret Soviet Laser Tank on display at Russian Museum

See this old tank? I realize that it looks like something out of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, but this is, or was, a top secret Soviet laser tank.

I say was because it was recently declassified and shipped to a military museum near Moscow. The 1K17 was accepted for service in 1992, but it was never mass-produced.

In case you are wondering, this isn’t a laser tank in the sense that it can shoot beams like some war machine from Star Wars. Before you go and say “awww”, you should know that this was made to “blind pilots and weapons systems, dazzling optical and electronic mechanisms even under the most severe weather conditions”.

Sadly, I don’t have any more detail than that as far as its purpose is concerned. I wonder how a vehicle that could blind people would do in an actual battlefield.

Of course, the cold war had to end, so this laser tank was put out to pasture along with billions of dollars worth of nuclear missiles. In retrospect, I don’t know whether I would want to see this thing fired, because it would probably be the last thing that I saw. I’m always glad that some types of warfare was avoided (for now), along with nuclear holocaust.