From Syria to the Crimea, one weapon has accompanied Russia’s ground forces both overseas and to Russia’s so-called “near abroad”: artillery rockets. Lightweight and capable of laying waste to enemy territory by the acre, rockets emit a terrifying howl as they streak towards their targets. Russia’s use of rockets as weapons of war goes back nearly one hundred years, to the days of Stalin and the new Soviet republic.
The Soviet Union lent itself heavily to science and technology, and worldwide research into rockets in the 1930s likely inspired Soviet engineers to look at rockets as a weapon. By 1931 the Soviets had developed the RS-132 unguided air-to-air rocket. Unlike cannon shells, the rockets were launched without a tube to guide initial flight, and as a result the RS-82 and RS-132 were wildly inaccurate, with a spread of about one degree. At point-blank range the deviation wasn’t significant, but with distance inaccuracy increased at practically an exponential rate.
The Grad featured a number of improvements over its wartime predecessors. A hydraulic locking mechanism for the launch tube array and the truck itself increased stability and accuracy. Like a rifle barrel, the BM-21’s launch tubes featured a spiral twist to impart a stabilizing spin on the rocket, which also increased accuracy. The tubes could be traversed vertically up to fifty-five degrees, which helped give the rockets a range of up to 12.6 miles.
A variety of new rockets were developed for the Grad. The most common warhead was the 9M22U, which had a 40.5-pound high-explosive warhead, more than three times the BM-13. Incendiary, antitank mine, separating high-explosive fragmentation, illumination and smoke rounds increased the utility of rocket artillery in both attack and defense.
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