Red telephone
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The "red telephone" is a famous hotline which linked the White House via National Military Command Center with the Kremlin during the Cold War. It was established following an agreement on 20 June 1963 after the Cuban missile crisis made it clear that reliable, direct communications between the two great nuclear powers was a vital 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, and more easily averted if communication had been faster. This link was encrypted using the theoretically unbreakable one-time pad systemDavid Kahn, The Codebreakers, pp. 715–716. 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. [link]
References
- ["Cold War hotline recalled"], BBC News, June 7, 2003, retrieved March 24, 2006
External links
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