R-7, the first intercontinental ballistic missile

On August 21, 1957, a Soviet R-7 rocket lifted from the Baikonur test site in Kazakhstan and flew thousands of kilometers to a target area on the Kamchatka Peninsula, the first successful full-range test of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). The Soviet news agency announced it days later. The R-7, designed under Sergei Korolev, was a huge liquid-fuel rocket with four strap-on boosters around a central core, built to deliver a heavy thermonuclear warhead to the United States.¹

The R-7 grew from the German V-2 of 1944, whose engineers and blueprints the Soviets, like the Americans, had captured, and from the nuclear weapons whose spread was driven by the Manhattan Project and the Soviet bomb of 1949. Once Soviet scientists could build hydrogen bombs, the missiles had to be larger to carry them, and Stalin's and then Khrushchev's government invested heavily in the program during the Cold War. The first R-7 test flight on May 15, 1957 failed, and several others did too, but the August flight worked. The R-7 was too big, slow to fuel and visible to be a practical weapon, and only a few operational launch complexes were ever built, though it proved the principle.²

Its real consequence appeared six weeks later, when a modified R-7 launched Sputnik on October 4, 1957. The same rocket family, much improved, launched Yuri Gagarin in 1961 and still flies as the Soyuz launcher. The United States answered with its Atlas, which flew successfully in 1958, and Titan and Minuteman followed. Missiles that could reach any city in about 30 minutes, with no defense, created the logic of mutual assured destruction and shaped the arms control agreements of the 1970s onward.¹²