Ancestry
V-2 to first ICBM flight.
Start with Dora and Peenemunde, not with a clean 1957 birthday. The type inherits a crime and a captured staff.
R-7 and Sputnik are one political season, not two unrelated shocks.
Timeline
- V-2 combat use
Paris and then London -- a city-attack rocket, not yet intercontinental.
- Team scramble
US, USSR, and Britain take people and hardware from the German programme.
- R-7 ICBM flight
First intercontinental ballistic missile flight.
- Sputnik
The same family of rocket as a political shock in orbit.
- Atlas and Minuteman
US land types enter service; silo fields begin.
- Polaris at sea
The SLBM cousin is operational.
- Cuban Missile Crisis
Alert, blockade, and a bargain -- not a launch.
- SALT I and ABM Treaty
The type becomes a counted diplomatic object.
- INF Treaty
A whole class of shorter missiles eliminated -- a cousin story that recast the ICBM debate.
- New START
Signed 2010; extended 2021 -- the late numbered limit.
Eras
Shock years
R-7, Sputnik, Atlas, Minuteman, Cuba.
Triad and SALT
Parity talk and the first limits.
Scare and reduction
Able Archer; INF; START as the Cold War ends.
Inheritance and new testers
Ukraine transfers; later regional programmes as news, not as a manual.
Milestones
21 August 1957
The R-7 makes the type real.
October 1962
Alert without launch -- the political peak.
SALT I, 1972
Counting replaces an open race, on paper.
Treaties are as historical as flight tests. A page that only lists rockets is a catalogue, not this atlas.
New testers after 1991 do not turn this file into a watch list.