Pretty much everything with a potential dual use is classified as munitions, the U.S. Munitions List is quite long and explicit - https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=86008bdffd1fb2e79c...

A good example is shock absorbers designed for vehicles heavier than 30 tons. It has all kinds of civilian uses in heavy machinery, but since that's a key tech for armored vehicles, they are also on the munitions list. The same applies for rocket and jet engines above certain parameters, all kinds of space imaging technology, etc, etc.

Russians call everything a rocket anyway. RPG-7 is a rocket, Saturn V is a rocket, Sidewinder is a rocket. They’re not confused about it, they regard all to be in the same category.

It’s a bit political than technical that in American English guided rocket weapons are always called “missiles“. Same reason as J in NASA JPL stands for _jet_ though they don’t normally do turbine jets.

So calling non-military rockets as munitions could be, I think, potentially more straightforward.

> Russians call everything a rocket anyway. RPG-7 is a rocket

Bad example. РПГ is "ручной противотанковый гранатомёт", approximately "man-portable anti-tank grenade launcher". Its round, "ПГ-7" is "anti-tank grenade". Rocket-propelled grenade is a backronym.

Well, both the Atlas and Soyuz (currently used by NASA and Roskosmos) were developed primarily for the U.S. and Soviet militaries as ICBM vehicles, the Space Race was something of a PR operation.

After all, you don't really need to have an explosive payload: just dropping a heavy enough missile can be devastating.

Are you referring to Kinetic Bombardment?[0]

Since kinetic energy increases with the square of velocity, if you can create a payload that can travel at hypersonic speeds (like a tungsten rod) without burning up then the amount of kinetic energy is in the tens of millions of joules. That's enough to destroy any single target, but doesn't have nearly the same destructive power as a nuke, which releases trillions of joules of energy.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment

According to the wikipedia article, the tungsten rods in question would be 9 tons and would deliver an explosion equivalent to that of 11.5 tons of TNT. Considering the cost of getting it into orbit, this is only a good idea when the advantages of the delivery method outweigh that cost. The advantages of "rods from God" compared to ICBMS are that they're twice as fast and have different dynamics vs early warning systems or anti-ballistic systems.

By the way, checkout small kinetic projectiles bombardment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazy_Dog_(bomb)

Sure, tungsten rods also work. What I meant was something far less sophisticated - "we don't care what specifically is hit, as long as it impacts in the general area." See e.g. the Qassam missiles, or similarly, the North Korean space program (or "space program"?) and Japan.

> That's enough to destroy any single target, but

but that’s enough to destroy any single target! Like some bunkers.

True, but unless you have hundreds of them, I'm not sure if it's useful for MAD (i.e. replacement for nukes).

I suppose if you made the tungsten rods heavy enough and made made them travel fast enough you could get kinetic energy on par with small nukes, but the problem is it's highly directional (i.e. most of the energy is released underground and absorbed by the earth), unlike a nuke which can release all of its energy at once in an airburst 100 feet above a city.

It would be useful as a PGM in the arsenal, but probably not enough for MAD in an arms race. I could be wrong, though.

I thought that limiting the GPS from the top was to complicate making cheap missiles, something that might be used by rogue states or terrorists; for MAD, you probably wouldn't choose COTS equipment.

The majority of rockets that NASA has used throughout history are just modified nuclear missiles.

I'm a software engineer at NASA and it's an annoying fact of life for us every day. There's a huge overlap in the technology, we just have different applications. In fact, a huge percentage of our airplanes are aircraft military aircraft.

Doesn't NASA also work with spy satellites?

I believe "strong" encryption is still viewed as munitions in the US, or at least it used to be.

That's been over for a long time (1996): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars#PC_era

There's still some verbiage around commercial products and embargoed countries, but realistically, North Korea and Iran have access to OpenSSL, so it hardly matters.

Another interesting class of dual-use technology are fast power switching elements. And both modern SMPSs and Class D audio amplifiers are worryingly near to what would have to be considered a “munition”.

What are the rules for munitions-class switching power supplies and Class D amps?

A CPU switches a hell of a lot faster than either of those, although with much less current.

It is an unfortunate fact that many scientific endeavors involve technology that can have dual uses.

Starting with a rock. So, essentially, the whole tech tree.

Anything's a munition if you drop it on someone's head from that height and speed.