Red telephone

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Moscow-Washington hotline. (Discuss)

The "red telephone" was a famous hotline which linked the White House via the National Military Command Center with the Kremlin during the Cold War. It was established following an agreement on June 20, 1963 after the events of the Cuban missile crisis made it clear that reliable, direct communications between the two nuclear powers was a necessity. During the crisis, it took nearly 12 hours to receive and decode Nikita Khruschev's 3,000 word initial settlement message—a dangerously long time in the chronology of nuclear brinkmanship. By the time the U.S. had drafted a reply, a tougher message from Moscow had been received demanding that U.S. missiles be removed from Turkey. White House advisors at the time thought that the crisis could have been more quickly resolved and easily averted if communication had been faster. This link was encrypted using the mathematically unbreakable one-time pad system.^[1] Initially the red phone was not actually a telephone, but a set of high-speed teleprinters, based on the idea that spontaneous verbal communications could lead to miscommunications and misperceptions. By the mid-1970s, the hotline featured an actual telephone. The hotline was used for the first time during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war when both superpowers informed each other of military moves which might have been provocative or ambiguous.^[2] The hotline was originally carried over the TAT-1, the first submarine transatlantic telephone cable.

An original East German teleprinter used in the initial 1963 "hotline" setup is currently on display at the National Cryptologic Museum located on the National Security Agency (NSA) campus at Fort Meade, Maryland.