Kh-20

The Raduga Kh-20, known to NATO as the AS-3 Kangaroo, was a Soviet air-launched cruise missile armed with a thermonuclear warhead, developed during the Cold War to be carried by the Tu-95 strategic bomber. Design under M. I. Gurevich began in 1954, test launches used modified MiG-19 fighters, and flight testing of the missile began on 17 March 1958 before it entered service in 1960. A turbojet-powered missile of about 12,000 kg launch weight and 14.95 m length, it flew at Mach 2 over a range of 380 to 600 km with inertial guidance and radio command correction. It was meant for retaliation against major targets in the United States, but arming a bomber took 22 hours at first and the early warheads were hard to store, so it was relegated to secondary strikes on targets that survived a first attack and to strikes on aircraft carrier groups. Its manual guidance was vulnerable to jamming. The Soviet Air Forces were its only operator, and the Kh-22 replaced it by the mid-1980s.