What country was the first to obtain Nuclear Missiles?

by Codyw28
restricteddata

It depends on how one defines "nuclear missiles":

  • If you mean nuclear weapons generically, it was the United States, who had atomic bombs in 1945.

  • If you specifically mean putting an atomic warhead on the end of any kind of rocket, the first deployed nuclear-armed rockets were the MGR-1 Honest John and the MGM-5 Corporal, both of which were short-range surface-to-surface missiles deployed by the United States in the mid-1950s (1954-1955).

  • If you mean an intercontinental-range ballistic missile with a nuclear warhead, the honor of that goes to the R-7A Semyorka missile deployed by the Soviet Union in early 1959.

The USA and USSR both worked heavily on this work and their "firsts" are very closely spaced in time (e.g. the US Atlas ICBM was deployed in the fall of 1959).