Ali's mother Jane tells her daughter of her own time in the land of Isshuay... Isshuay's border has been breached by a Missyl, a mysterious, shape-changing creature from a neighbouring land. Hopelessly lost in a hostile environment, the lonely Missyl is unwittingly contaminating the inhabitants of Isshuay as it searches for the way home. As the years pass, the land's goodness is slowly disappearing through the breach in the border. Anger and despair have replaced the happiness that once filled the land. Jane is selected by the fabulous Silver Ones as the one person who has the knowledge and skills to heal their land. Happily accepting the challenge, she travels with young Nestor across the Shimmering into Isshuay to begin her task of seeking the elusive Missyl and sending it home. Joined by Old Marje and other intriguing characters, she discovers the dangers and the wonders of Isshuay.

In the 1960s the Air Force buried 1,000 ICBMs in pastures across the Great Plains to keep U.S. nuclear strategy out of view. As rural civilians of all political stripes found themselves living in the Soviet crosshairs, a proud Plains individualism gave way to an economic dependence on the military-industrial complex that still persists today.

"The definitive history.…With his masterly book, Mr. Plokhy has sounded a warning bell." — The Economist A harrowing account of the Cuban missile crisis and how the US and USSR came to the brink of nuclear apocalypse. Nearly thirty years after the end of the Cold War, today’s world leaders are abandoning disarmament treaties, building up their nuclear arsenals, and exchanging threats of nuclear strikes. To survive this new atomic age, we must relearn the lessons of the most dangerous moment of the Cold War: the Cuban missile crisis. Serhii Plokhy’s Nuclear Folly offers an international perspective on the crisis, tracing the tortuous decision-making that produced and then resolved it, which involved John Kennedy and his advisers, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, and their commanders on the ground. In breathtaking detail, Plokhy vividly recounts the young JFK being played by the canny Khrushchev; the hotheaded Castro willing to defy the USSR and threatening to align himself with China; the Soviet troops on the ground clearing jungle foliage in the tropical heat, and desperately trying to conceal nuclear installations on Cuba, which were nonetheless easily spotted by U-2 spy planes; and the hair-raising near misses at sea that nearly caused a Soviet nuclear-armed submarine to fire its weapons. More often than not, the Americans and Soviets misread each other, operated under false information, and came perilously close to nuclear catastrophe. Despite these errors, nuclear war was ultimately avoided for one central reason: fear, and the realization that any escalation on either the Soviets’ or the Americans’ part would lead to mutual destruction. Drawing on a range of Soviet archival sources, including previously classified KGB documents, as well as White House tapes, Plokhy masterfully illustrates the drama and anxiety of those tense days, and provides a way for us to grapple with the problems posed in our present day.

Warren Commission hearings.

I scanned the original manual at 600 dpi.