10 Most-Terrifying Space Weapons

The Space Race saw the world's two superpowers, the USA and the USSR, embark upon a competition during the height of the Cold War to see who could achieve supremacy in spaceflight capability. The Russians managed to get the first artificial satellite (Sputnik 1) into space, as well as the first human (Yuri Gagarin), while the US won the race to land on the Moon as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked across its surface after navigating Apollo II there in 1969.

Yet one other frightening and disconcerting development during the Cold War was the race to militarise space. Throughout the second-half of the 20th Century, the USA and the USSR looked to exhaust every possible avenue they could in order to get ahead of one another - and that included developing weapons that could be operated from, or sent up into, space.

Although some of the ideas were extremely far-fetched and never got past the proposal stage, such as re-directing asteroids to smash into the Earth's surface, other projects including space-dwelling nuclear missiles, anti-satellite weapons and laser guns did become a reality.

So here are 10 of the weapons that have have been created or proposed for use in space - and its a quacky and extremely-frightening list...