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‘Ballistic’ concerns the throwing of missiles. It comes from the Latin ballista, which referred to artillery, and ultimately derives from ballein – ancient Greek for ‘to throw’. An early appearance of the word in English, with a variant spelling, came in 1775: ‘The term mangona, or mangonel [a medieval stone throwing siege weapon] was generally applicable to balistic engines.’
Today, ballistic is most notably linked with the warhead-bearing missile, as seen in a 1954 issue of Commonweal Magazine: ‘[T]he… intercontinental ballistic missile with nuclear warhead is the ugly development next to be expected.’ A rocket-powered ballistic missile is one in which guidance and power are provided only during launch.
The first ballistic missile fired in anger was Nazi Germany’s liquid-fuelled A-4, better-known to history as the V-2 rocket, one of Adolf Hitler’s infamous Vergeltungswaffen, ‘vengeance weapons’. Unlike the earlier V-1 ‘Doodlebug’, which flew level, the supersonic V-2 instead travelled in an arcing trajectory, out of the atmosphere, before coming back to earth.
The 14m-tall A-4 could carry a 2,145lb warhead to a target up to 195 miles away from its launch site. The weapon attained the highest point of its flight (its apogee) of about 58 miles, before returning groundward. Fired in large numbers at Britain beginning in September 1944, it could not be stopped by either warplanes or groundfire, and usually hit without warning.
Despite the tremendous production costs, the V-2 provided little military benefit to Germany, doing insufficient damage to alter the increasingly unfavourable course of the war. The A-4 was nonetheless the forerunner of later ballistic nuclear missiles, including the awesomely powerful US Minuteman and Soviet SS-20, which were produced during the Cold War.
The phrase ‘to go ballistic’, meaning to go into a rage, is a product of the 1980s.
