Ukraine Accuses Russia of ICBM Attack

Western officials (speaking on condition of anonymity) deny the claim.

As some Americans may know, the Space Race of 1955-1975 between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was closely connected with Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) development. An (ICBM) is launched into into space, where it can travel a long distance, and is then steered to reenter the atmosphere to drop its target.

ICBMs are thought to have a minimum range of 3,400 miles, but some models can travel up to 5,500 miles, according to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.

ICBMs can be fired from silos or mobile launch vehicles and can be solid or liquid fueled. Solid-fueled ICBMs are regarded as more dangerous as they can be moved and launched more quickly than liquid-fueled ones. They can be armed with conventional or nuclear warheads. The first ICBM rocket was launched in 1957 by the then-Soviet Union. The United States followed in 1959.

According to various news reports, the Ukrainian military claims that an ICBM (equipped with a conventional warhead) was fired on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro this (Thursday) morning.

Western officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, dispute this claim. As just reported in the New York Times.

The Ukraine War has long struck me as bearing an eerie resemblance to the conflict between Austria-Hungary and Russia that was triggered by the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. After ascertaining that the murder was committed by a Serbian secret military society called the Black Hand, hotheads in the Austrian court issued an ultimatum to the King of Serbia, who recognized that he couldn’t comply with it without surrendering his sovereignty. The Russian court objected to the Austrians bullying their Slavic brothers in the Balkans, and the conflict escalated from there to become World War I.

I used to live around the corner from the former Imperial Palace in Vienna and I often marveled that the Habsburg’s 700 year reign ended with a terrible war that could have been easily averted had cooler heads prevailed.

Had the old Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph been a younger man in the summer of 1914, he might have taken a stronger hand in the affairs at court and intervened to stop the escalation. Unfortunately, the Emperor was 84 years old and very frail, and he spent most of the summer at his hunting lodge in Bad Ischl, far away from the machinations in Vienna.

If history teaches us anything, it’s that war is always an extremely unpredictable thing that frequently surprises the people who instigate and pursue it. I can’t remember the last time the U.S. government’s foreign policy establishment correctly predicted the outcome of any of its adventures.

The same people who escalated with Russia by sending Kamala Harris to the Munich Security Conference in February 2022 had just performed a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan after occupying the country for twenty years. The purpose of this fantastically expensive adventure was purportedly to get rid of the Taliban, which for some reason didn’t happen.