It's a safe bet that many have never seen a minaret, except on alarmist campaign posters where they are depicted as comic-book missiles.
This represents countless megatons of thermonuclear material -- enough to turn the world into what journalist Jonathan Schell once warned would be a 'republic of insects and grass,'" author Gretchen Heefner wrote of the missiles in her 2012 book, The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman In The American Heartland.
Graham Allison, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government who has written a book about the missile crisis, noted that Kennedy had stipulated that the missiles absolutely had to be removed from Cuba.
While researching a 2008 book on the missile crisis, I plotted the positions of Soviet and American ships during this period, on the basis of United States intelligence records.
That's why I called my book, years ago, Missile Envy.
We collected a few t-shirts and some trinkets and I bought 4 Che Guevara key rings, 2 hats and a book about the Missile Crisis written by, who else, but Fidel himself.
With every repetition of the fighting cliche, "make no mistake" the deeper the sinking feeling that neither he, nor his administration has a clue about how to reboot their systems away from the comic-book obsession with "missile defence" to actually protecting America from men with razor-blades, box-cutters and Arabic flight-training manuals, much less an elementary degree in anthrax 101.
"You can't aim a book like a cruise missile," he maintains, warning his readers "not to commit intellectual dishonesty in the hunt for the buck".
The book, "The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis," was written by the late Sergo Mikoyan, whose father, Anastas Mikoyan, was a Soviet statesman who negotiated with Mr. Castro in Cuba in 1962, and it was edited by Svetlana Savranskaya, a researcher at the National Security Archive.
The revelations are contained in documents donated to George Washington University's National Security Archive and which are appearing for the first time in English in a new book, The Soviet Cuba Missile Crisis.
