This is not correct. Maybe it was real thing from cold war era. In any case, it has not been true for a long time. Conventional missile artillery is today's r

This is not correct. Maybe it was real thing from cold war era. In any case, it has not been true for a long time. Conventional missile artillery is today's reality. The idea that detecting launch of multiple MRBM's or IRBM would be automatically assumed to be nuclear strike is absurd. US knows that China's second artillery has wast range of conventionally armed ballistic missiles and they are part of their conventional military strategy. Russia has batteries of Iskander-M missiles directed towards Europe. Large air-defense missiles like Patriot, S-300, SM-3 can also be mistaken as ballistic missiles during the launch. Terminology: Ballistic missile is general term referring to a missile that follows a ballistic trajectory. There are several different classes of BM's (Ballistic Missiles) and they can be easily distinguished from each other by following their trajectory little bit (there are battlefield-range, short-range, medium-range, intermediate-range and intercontinental BMs).