ICBM

What is required for a missile to be categorized this way?

By Deane Barker • •

This is an acronym for Intercontinental Ballistic Missile.

“Intercontinental” means it has to have a range of at least 3,400 miles. Turns out there are other categories:

(The numbers seem random because they’re really set in kilometers: 1,000; 3,000; and 5,500.)

These range categories are set by the Congressional Research Service. Their report (PDF) refers to “The Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Terms of Reference Handbook” for the definition of “ballistic”:

a missile that is guided during powered flight and unguided during free flight when the trajectory that it follows is subject only to the external influences of gravity and atmospheric drag

So this type missile is one that is powered while it goes upward, but then the power stops and it arcs back down. This is different than a “cruise missile,” which is under powered (mostly level) flight all the way to the target.

I looked up the word “ballistic” for a general definition and got this:

The word comes from a Roman weapon called a ballista, which chucked rocks into the air, whose name comes from the Greek for “throw.”

It basically means the science of unpowered objects moving through an atmosphere. If you throw a rock, you eject it with force, but then it’s unpowered. Same thing when you fire a bullet from a gun. It’s about how moving, but unpowered, objects are acted on by gravity and air resistance.

In particular, nothing about “ICBM” indicates that it is nuclear in nature. It only refers to the range and type of missile flight. What the missile delivers is a separate matter.

So how far can ICBM’s reach? Really, really far.

Russia and the former Soviet Union have the longest range missiles. The RS-28 Sarmat can reportedly fly 11,000 or so miles, or even longer if they let it exit the atmosphere into low-orbit. It can effectively reach almost anywhere in the world.

I did some measuring on Google Maps. From the extreme Eastern edge of Russia (right above North Korea), it’s about 4,200 miles to the West Coast of the U.S.. From the extreme Western edge of Russia (just outside Belarus), it’s about 4,300 miles to the East Coast.

Interestingly, these routes don’t get much longer, due to the Great Circle Route. I measured from the very center of Russia (as well as I could tell, visually) to the very center of the US (somewhere in Kansas, I figured), and it was only 4,600 miles. The path Google measured went almost due north (it exited the U.S. in North Dakota) and over the North Pole. Using that route logic, traveling from the very northern border of Russia to the very northern border of Canada is only about 1,700 miles (you could drive that in two days).

The longest range U.S. missile is the Titan II, at about 9,000 miles. However, we also have the Trident series which has a slightly shorter range at 7,000 miles, but are submarine-based, which means they can be launched from directly off a coastline.

Why I Looked It Up

It was reported recently that Russia launched ICBMs toward Ukraine, which was the first time these weapons had ever been used in combat. These were (thankfully) conventional weapons.

When I realized that “ICBM” didn’t mean “nuclear,” I got to wondering exactly what it did mean.

However, there’s some debate about the classification of the weapons used in Ukraine. The missiles were initially claimed to be RS-26 Rubezh missiles. Wikipedia says this:

[It’s] a Russian solid-fueled intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) with a nuclear warhead, of which the range bracket just barely classifies it as an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM)

(Note the classification of the missile as both an IRBM and an ICBM, which is odd.)

Later, Vladimir Putin himself revealed the missile to be a Oresnik, which is a an IRBM.

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