V-2
German 1944-45 ballistic rocket -- the type's grandfather. Ancestry or first type-name of Intercontinental ballistic missile -- history of a class, not a build list.
Darker cells mean a higher score for this topic on that metric.
Scale75
Intensity35
Duration62
Tech shift96
Political impact85
Cultural memory72
LessMore
Last reviewed Sources & creditsMedia creditsMethodology
Quick answers
Are the scores a ranking of nations or armies?
No. Scores are browsing aids inside an era-bounded atlas — not live league tables of countries.
Did ICBMs come from the V-2?
Teams, drawings, and the idea of a ballistic rocket did. Range, warhead, and guidance of the 1957-62 types were a different industrial generation. Mittelbau-Dora slave labour is part of the V-2 ledger.
What was the Cuban Missile Crisis to this type?
October 1962 was about medium-range missiles in Cuba and a US blockade, with ICBM and bomber forces on high alert in the background. It is a political crisis file, not a firing drill.
What did SALT and START do?
They capped and later reduced declared launchers and warheads, with verification. SALT I is 1972; START I is 1991; New START is 2010. Details belong to the treaty texts, not to a targeting lesson.
How does the submarine page relate?
SSBNs carry SLBMs -- the sea leg of the same deterrent idea. See that page for boats; this page for land missiles and the shared treaty story.
How does Korea fit?
The ROK was not a 1950s ICBM operator. The peninsula sits in later extended-deterrence and regional missile politics -- described as history, not as a live threat map.
Historical Strategic Rocket Forces, SAC missile wings, and later numbered USAF wings -- past structures.
SSBN forces belong on the submarine page. No live silo map and no ROK "secret ORBAT" invention.
Systems
R-7
First ICBM flight, 21 August 1957; also Sputnik's launcher.
Minuteman
US solid-fuel silo ICBM from 1962 -- a civic landscape in the Plains.
SALT / START
The numbered treaty families that made the type a diplomatic object. Treaty, crisis, or doctrine caption -- not a launch or employment guide.
Wernher von Braun
V-2 technical lead, then a US space-and-missile name -- a career that begins in a slave-labour rocket and ends in NASA fame. Use as history, not as a hero stencil.
October 1962
Alert without launch -- the political peak.
Meters
Atlas scale (not a war)
75
Peak intensity
35
How long it defined a period
62
Doctrinal / technical shift
96
Borders, regimes, law, alliances
85
Film, school, ritual density
72
Hotspots
Ancestry
1944-57: V-2 to first ICBM flight. Named as historical geography of Intercontinental ballistic missile, not as a targeting list.
Shock years
1957-62: R-7, Sputnik, Atlas, Minuteman, Cuba. Named as historical geography of Intercontinental ballistic missile, not as a targeting list.
Triad and SALT
1963-79: Parity talk and the first limits. Named as historical geography of Intercontinental ballistic missile, not as a targeting list.
Scare and reduction
1980-91: Able Archer; INF; START as the Cold War ends. Named as historical geography of Intercontinental ballistic missile, not as a targeting list.
Inheritance and new testers
After 1991: Ukraine transfers; later regional programmes as news, not as a manual. Named as historical geography of Intercontinental ballistic missile, not as a targeting list.
Materials
Chronology (1957-present as a deployed type (V-2 ancestry 1944-45))
Intercontinental ballistic missile is bounded as 1957-present as a deployed type (V-2 ancestry 1944-45). 1944-09-08 opens the usual narrative (V-2 combat use); 2010-21 closes it (New START).
Theatre: From Peenemunde and Kapustin Yar to silos, subm.
Place is evidence. From Peenemunde and Kapustin Yar to silos, submarines, and treaty tables is where Intercontinental ballistic missile happened -- a map for readers, not a guide for repeating it.
Human-cost band
not a war -- a system; human cost sits in the nuclear-age crises and the wars that funded the type Keep the figure as a range. Spectacle integers are not a census.
Minuteman
US solid-fuel silo ICBM from 1962 -- a civic landscape in the Plains. A material of the Intercontinental ballistic missile vocabulary, dated to 1957-present as a deployed type (V-2 ancestry 1944-45).
A missileer career in 1962 Montana is a social history. It is not a shift schedule for anyone now.
No PAL, no enable-code, no launch-procedure content.