for examples closer to Earth. It is by no means an apocalyptic weapon, but a satellite-to-satellite laser attack could make a detectable space junk mess for decades to come.
That generation of chemical lasers use dangerous chemical reactions, like burning hydrogen in fluorine or mixing different kinds of bleach: operator safety concerns kept them from being fielded.
We may never actually know, but I have my doubts anything like that was ever fielded. You're talking about beam-expansion over thousands of km for a sat-to-sat weapon instead of the tens of km for the eventually de-funded ABL/YAL-1 (some two decades after the suggested Soviet space-based system.) You avoid the atmosphere in space but you can't avoid diffraction. Teller's original concepts for SDI space-based lasers proposed literal nuclear bombs to provide the necessary energy density at range; neither those, nor the other host of exotic 80s-era directed energy weapons concepts seem to have made it into operation.
i will have a hell of a time remembering where it was, but a few years ago i read an interview or essay that said this payload was actually a decoy, that the soviets were responding to the SDI program but could not get a workable laser with enough power in such a package, and that it was just there to look like a laser -- including by slowly leaking carbon dioxide, which would be the signature sought by american ground observers
With exception of the RAKS entry, all the other stuff has been confirmed. It's just mostly experimental, but built, systems.
A bit of that happened because USSR ended up assuming that USA was more ready with some techs than they thought, and scaled to match (the amount of crazy that was due to essentially misunderstandings was, well, crazy).
