A study of radial conformal Killing fields (RCKF) in Minkowski space-time is carried out, which leads to their classification into three disjointed classes. Their integral curves are straight or hyperbolic lines admitting orthogonal surfaces of constant curvature, whose sign is related to the causal character of the field. Otherwise, the kinematic properties of the timelike RCKF are given and their applications in kinematic cosmology is discussed. (C) 1999 American Institute of Physics. [S0022-2488(99)00507-1].