The UR-200 was an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) developed by Vladimir Chelomey's OKB-52 in the

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...

. It was known during the

Cold War The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because t ...

by the

NATO reporting name NATO reporting names are code names for military equipment from Russia, China, and historically, the Eastern Bloc (Soviet Union and other nations of the Warsaw Pact). They provide unambiguous and easily understood English words in a uniform man ...

SS-10 '' Scrag'' and internally by the

GRAU The Main Missile and Artillery Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation (), commonly referred to by its transliterated Russian acronym GRAU (), is a department of the Russian Ministry of Defense. It is subordinate to the ...

index 8K81. The design was authorized by the Decisions of the Central Committee of the CPSU of March 16 and August 1, 1961, and the draft project was finished in July 1962. It first flew on November 4, 1963, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. The ninth and final flight was conducted on October 20, 1964.

Description

The UR-200 was a two-stage liquid-propellant universal ICBM for delivery of replaceable payloads to the range up to 12000 km, launch of interceptor satellites for space defense, naval recon satellites, and orbital maneuvering warheads. It was capable of carrying around of payload, and could be launched from flat pads, or missile silos built for the R-16 missile. Unusually for a Soviet missile, the first stage provided attitude control by means of thrust vectoring. Nitrogen tetroxide and UDMH were used as propellants.

FOBS

The FOBS, or Fractional Orbital Bombardment System, was a Soviet programme to place a nuclear warhead into a 150 km

low Earth orbit A low Earth orbit (LEO) is an orbit around Earth with a period of 128 minutes or less (making at least 11.25 orbits per day) and an eccentricity less than 0.25. Most of the artificial objects in outer space are in LEO, with an altitude never m ...

, in order to allow the warhead to approach the enemy from any direction, below missile tracking radar systems. The UR-200 was one of several rockets proposed for this purpose, along with the 8K713 and R-36. The use of the UR-200 for FOBS deployment was cancelled in October 1964, when

Nikita Khrushchev Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (– 11 September 1971) was the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and chairman of the country's Council of Ministers from 1958 to 1964. During his rule, Khrushchev s ...

was removed from power.

Operational history

The UR-200 was never deployed operationally. The successful development of the storable hypergolic-fuelled R-36 silo-launched missile led to the cancellation of the UR-200 in 1965.

Operators

Related developments

* R-9 Desna by Sergei Korolev * R-16 by Mikhail Yangel * Universal Rocket * UR-100 "minor" missile in development set of ''UR-100..UR-200..UR-500'' line * UR-500 "major" missile in development set of ''UR-100..UR-200..UR-500'' line

References