About KH-22 Cruise Missile:
- It is a Soviet-era long-rangeairborne supersonic cruise missile.
- It is also known by the NATO reporting name AS-4 'Kitchen'.
- The Kh-22 family was developed in the USSR in the 1960s and specifically designed to be launched from Tupolev-22 bombers.
- This missile was intended primarily to destroy large naval targets like aircraft carriers, using either conventional or nuclear warheads.
- It boasts impressive specifications, including a speed of up to Mach 4.6 and a range of approximately 600 kilometers.
- It weighs 5,820 kilograms.
- A total of approximately 3,000 such missiles were produced in the USSR.
- After the USSR collapsed, quite a few of them remained in Ukraine. However, soon after independence in 1991, Ukraine gave up its nuclear and strategic aviation arsenal.
- In 2000, Ukraine transferred 386 Kh-22 missiles to Russia as an installment against the gas debt.
- The successor to the Kh-22 became the Kh-32, which can be carried by the new Russian Tu-22M3M bombers.
- The new missile features a conventional warhead, an improved rocket motor, and a new radar imaging terminal seeker. It has a longer range but a smaller warhead.
