The complaint was that there was no balistic parabola, which only makes sense if there is no trust.
we can surmise that it's not under thrust despite what the flames coming out the back would suggest.
Uhhh, yeah I think we can all agree that the notion of things being in space or not falls apart quite a bit in this game. The satellite for example is obviously lower than it should be, because keeping it to scale would be way too clunky to use.
I think it extrapolates to the nuke. The devs designed what they thought looked cool, and I am somewhat confident that the flight path was a pragmatic decision to allow intercepting of the nuke during the complete flight while also being sure to avoid terrain