A Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) is a warhead delivery system that uses a low earth orbit towards its target destination. Just before reaching the target, it deorbits through a retrograde engine burn. The Soviet Union first developed FOBS as a nuclear-weapons delivery system in the 1960s. It was one of the first Soviet efforts to use space to deliver nuclear weapons. In August 2021, the People's Republic of China tested a weapon that combined a FOBS with a hypersonic glide vehicle. Like a kinetic bombardment system but with nuclear weapons, FOBS had several attractive qualities: it had no range limit, its flight path would not reveal the target location, and warheads could be directed to North America over the South Pole, evading detection by NORAD's north-facing early warning systems. The maximum altitude would be around 150 km. Energetically, this would require a launch vehicle powerful enough to be capable of putting the weapon 'into orbit'. However the orbit is only a fraction of a full orbit, not sustained, and so there would be much less need to control a precise orbit, or to maintain it long term. Development history and deployment Lead-up to FOBS development Some USSR officials began expressing a desire for a FOBS-type weapon around the time of Sputnik's launch. By the early 1960s, the Soviet Union felt that pursuing a system like the FOBS would be a natural next step given their belief that the US was already planning to use space to mount nuclear attacks The success of the Soviet Vostok program which saw a rocket send a human into orbit and then land at a predesignated location made this kind of weapon seem more feasible. Competing FOBS designs Soviet rocket engineer Sergei Korolev seems to have been responsible for the first FOBS-type missile design. His offering was the GR-1; it was also known as 'Global Missile 1' within Korolev's design bureau, as SS-X-10 Scrag by NATO authorities, and as 11A513 (or 8K73) by Soviet GRAU index. Korolev's research began as early as 1960 and the GR-1 project was sanctioned by Soviet officials on September 24, 1962. Korolev brought up the idea of the GR-1 to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in early 1962. Soon after, Khrushchev announced that the Soviet Union was capable of utilizing "global missiles" that could fly over both the North and South Poles on their way to a target, continuing on