What is an ICBM?
An Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) is a long range explosive device with the potential to cross oceans and continents. Many major world powers including all of the UN Security Council members have the capability to launch ICBMs. Since these weapons are often armed with nuclear warheads, they are highly destructive, and they would only be launched in extreme circumstances when other means have failed. Most nations have monitoring systems in place to detect the presence of ICBMs in the airspace, and some countries have also attempted to design systems which could neutralize these missiles. The first ICBM appears to have been developed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and powers such as the United States and China quickly followed once the Russians demonstrated the technology. ICBMs were a major issue in the Cold War, since the participating nations were understandably concerned about missile launches which could threaten major cities. Some politicians felt that the prol
Well, an ICBM is nothing more than a long metal cylinder loaded with fuel and something at the tip of the missile, a warhead of some kind. The missiles I dealt with all were tipped with nuclear warheads. Early on in the process of the development of ICBMs after World War II, there were just single warheads. But as the technology developed, missiles were built with multiple warheads. These were all nuclear. They’re very sophisticated. They’re very difficult to construct. Guidance systems, in order to give the accuracies that you need, are very expensive and require a great deal of technology. So it is not a small task for any country — whether you’re talking about the United States or former Soviet Union, China, Great Britain, France — to build an ICBM, an intercontinental ballistic missile. They’re very difficult to maintain in terms of getting them in place. They don’t require much in the way of upkeep — as a matter of fact, the natural state of an ICBM in a silo is an alert state,
