cruise missile

cruise missile
a winged guided missile designed to deliver a conventional or nuclear warhead by flying at low altitudes to avoid detection by radar.

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Type of low-flying strategic guided missile developed by the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the 1960s and '70s.

The V-1 missile was a precursor. Powered by jet engines, cruise missiles may carry either a nuclear or a conventional warhead. They are designed to hug the ground, which makes them hard to detect by radar. They are launched from ships, submarines, airplanes, and the ground.

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      type of low-flying strategic guided missile. The German V-1 missile used in World War II was a precursor of the cruise missile, which was developed by the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1960s and '70s. Capable of carrying either a nuclear or a conventional warhead, the cruise missile was designed to have a very low radar cross section and to hug the ground while traveling at a relatively slow speed to its target.

      Three main versions of the cruise missile were being manufactured in the United States during the mid-1980s. All were single-stage, turbofan jet-propelled missiles with a cruising speed of 885 km per hour (550 miles per hour) and weighed from 1,200 to 1,800 kg (2,700 to 3,900 pounds) each. The missiles were guided by an inertial navigation system that was updated during flight by a technique called Tercom (terrain contour matching), using contour maps stored in the system's computerized memory. The air-launched cruise missile (ALCM) had a length of 6.3 m (20.7 feet); it attained a range of 2,500 km (1,500 miles). It was designed for deployment on the B-52 bomber. The Tomahawk sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM) and the Tomahawk ground-launched cruise missile (GLCM) had a length of 6.4 m (21 feet), a diameter of 53 cm (21 inches), and a range of 2,500 km (1,550 miles).

      The Soviet Union also produced a series of sea-, air-, and ground-launched cruise missiles. It is thought that Soviet cruise missiles had a length of about 7 m (23 feet) and a range of about 3,000 km (1,860 miles); the power plant was probably a turbojet.

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Universalium. 2010.

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