One hell of a gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis 1958-1964. Aleksandr Fursenko & Timothy Naftali. 1997.

Of the worst crisis of the Cold War - over Cuban missiles - we have had an incomplete picture. When did Castro embrace the Soviet Union? What proposals were put before the Kremlin through Kennedy’s back-door diplomacy? How close was nuclear war? 

With unprecedented access to Russian archives, the historians Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali give us the fullest account of the climax of the Cold War.