9M729

The cruise missile that ended the Cold War's most important arms-control treaty. The 9M729 (NATO: SSC-8 Screwdriver) is a ground-launched, nuclear-capable Russian cruise missile that Washington says flies far beyond the 500 km that the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty banned for land-based systems — and that Moscow insists stays just under it. The unresolvable dispute over its range was the proximate cause of the treaty's 2019 collapse, and reports of its combat use in Ukraine in 2025 turned a once-abstract arms-control argument into a battlefield reality.

Overview

The 9M729 is a ground-launched cruise missile (GLCM) developed by the Novator design bureau as part of the Iskander-K complex — the cruise-missile companion to the better-known Iskander-M ballistic missile. It is closely related to the sea-launched 3M14 Kalibr and the older RK-55, redesigned for road-mobile ground launch. The central fact of the 9M729 is political as much as technical: because the INF Treaty prohibited US and Soviet/Russian ground-launched missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 km, a Russian GLCM that exceeded 500 km was a treaty violation — and the US, with NATO backing, concluded exactly that, while Russia maintained the missile's range was a treaty-compliant ~480 km. That standoff, never resolved through inspection, drove the United States to withdraw from the INF Treaty in 2019.

Development

The 9M729 emerged from OKB Novator (within Almaz-Antey) in the early 2010s as a modernized member of a cruise-missile family stretching back to the RK-55 and overlapping with the naval Kalibr, per Wikipedia and Missile Threat (CSIS). Russia describes it as a modernized version of the 9M728 cruise missile already fielded with Iskander, "unified across most" components — its public position being that the 9M729 simply improved the warhead and guidance without breaching the 500 km line. US officials assessed otherwise: in early 2017 they reported Russia had deployed operational SSC-8 battalions, and the 2017 NASIC estimate put the missile's maximum range as high as 2,500 km. After years of accusations and a failed compliance dispute, the US suspended and then withdrew from the INF Treaty in 2019, with Russia following — ending the treaty that had eliminated an entire class of missiles in 1987.

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