he event was carefully covered up, with Nedelin's death attributed to an airplane crash. But various versions of the accident, and speculations on its cause, emerged over the years and only in the "Glasnost" era was the real story revealed. On the thirtieth anniversary of the explosion, in 1990, a "Red Star" army newspaper revealed that 165 people died in the accident, many of them burned beyond identification. A monument at the site lists only fifty-four names of servicemen who were killed, most of them based in Baikonur. The bodies of Marshal Nedelin and other ranking officers were taken to Moscow. Many were even buried in different parts of the cemetery so that no one would think that, God forbid, all those people were burned alive by the same hellish flame. Chief Designer of the R-16 Mikhail Yangel missed the accident by leaving the launch site to have a cigarette. Yangel didn't recover soon from the tragedy. He was seen weeping at both the cosmodrom and back home in Irkutsk Oblast...

Flight tests resumed on 2 February 1961, and the R-16's first successful flight test occurred on 2 April 1961. By late 1961 the first R-16 missile regiment was put on alert, though the system was not believed by Western intelligence to be operational until January 1962. The missile was fired from the surface launch complex "Desna-N", which consisted of two open launchers, a command center and a fuel depot. In May 1960 the development of a missile designated as R-16U and its corresponding silo launch complex "Desna-V" began. 

he R-16U was to become the first silo launched ICBM but it also had a surface-launch capability. The launch complex consisted of three silos located in a straight line 60 meters away from each other, along with four underground command centers and fuel depots. The silo launchers had a depth of 45.6 m, a diameter of 8.3 m and a door diameter of 4.64 m.