T-62

The T-62 is a Soviet main battle tank introduced in 1961 as a successor to the T-55, notable chiefly for being the first tank in the world to enter mass production armed with a smoothbore main gun, a 115mm gun that traded the rifled barrel's spin-stabilized accuracy at very long range for a higher muzzle velocity better suited to defeating the improving armor of contemporary Western tanks. Built on a chassis and general layout closely derived from the T-55, the T-62 retained the same low silhouette and sloped armor philosophy while incorporating an autoloader-adjacent ammunition arrangement and other incremental improvements, and it was produced in large numbers for Soviet forces and for export to Warsaw Pact and allied states. The T-62 saw extensive combat use in numerous Cold War-era conflicts, notably in Arab armies during the 1973 Yom Kippur War against Israeli forces and by Soviet forces themselves during the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s, experiences that exposed vulnerabilities in its armor against modern anti-tank weapons even as it remained a mainstay of numerous militaries.