Intercontinental ballistic missile (1944): Ancestry

Peenemunde, Mittelbau-Dora slave labour, and the 1945 scramble for teams and drawings are the unethical start. Korolev's R-7 was a missile that could also throw a satellite -- politics in a first stage. No propulsion or re-entry cookbook belongs here. The sentence is: a 1944 city-attack rocket became a 1957 intercontinental type.

SAC under LeMay and later Schriever's missileers built a US land leg. The Strategic Rocket Forces became a Soviet service. October 1962 put medium-range missiles in Cuba and ICBM alert in the background of thirteen days. McNamara's "assured destruction" language is a dated staff dialect, not a present targeting brief.

SALT I (1972), the ABM Treaty, SALT II (signed 1979, unratified), INF (1987), START I (1991), and New START (2010, extended 2021) are the ICBM's political battles. Cheating scandals and verification trains are part of that file. A treaty is a limit on a type -- described as history, not as a bargaining manual.