stations that it passed over during its flight. Pilyugin felt that newer inertial systems would have the accuracy needed to hit targets at 2,000 km without the mid-course updates. According to the official NPO Yuzhnoye history, Yangel's design was approved on 13 February 1953 by the Council of Ministers of the USSR. However, another source reports that the approval was granted on 13 August 1955. The first test was conducted at Kapustin Yar on 22 June 1957. In September 1958, Nikita Khrushchev personally visited Kapustin Yar to witness the launch of R-12, as well as its competitor, the R-5M. The latter had already been accepted into deployment at the time. The R-12 launch was a success and the next month, mass production of the vehicle started in Dnepropetrovsk. Test launches continued until December and demonstrated a maximum error of 2.3 km. For the work on R-12, on 1 July 1959, OKB-586 received the Order of Lenin, while the Hero of Socialist Labor (the highest industrial award) was awarded to Yangel, Smirnov and Budnik. Deployment The R-12 missile was introduced into the inventory on 4 March 1959 according to Russian sources, though Western intelligence believed that an initial operational capability was reached in late 1958. The first public display of this system was in November 1960, and they were deployed to Cuba in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The first five regiments with surface-based R-12 missiles were put on alert in May 1960, while the first regiment of silo-based missiles was placed on alert in January 1963. Their reaction time was assessed by the West at one to three hours in the normal soft-site readiness condition, and five to fifteen minutes in the normal hard-site readiness condition. The allowable hold time in a highly alert condition (reaction time equals three to five minutes) was long—many hours for soft sites, and days for hard sites. The R-12 and R-12U missiles reached their maximum operational launcher inventory of 608 in 1964–66. Some soft-site phase-out began in 1968, with some hard-site phase-out beginning in 1972. In 1978 their phase out and replacement with mobile ground-launched RSD-10 Pioneer missiles began. Further development Efforts to create a railway based version of the R-12 missile were suspended, but work then started on a silo-launched version. An underground launch complex, code-named Mayak-2 (Beacon-2), was constructed in Kapustin Yar. In September 1959 the R-12 took off from