Moscow–Washington Hotline

Why the link was built

During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis the United States took nearly twelve hours to receive and decode Nikita Khrushchev's 3,000-word initial settlement message. By the time Washington had drafted a reply, a tougher message had arrived from Moscow demanding the removal of U.S. missiles from Turkey. Official diplomatic messages typically took six hours to deliver, and unofficial channels such as television network correspondents were faster. The experience convinced both sides of the need for better communications.

Several people proposed a hotline. Thomas Schelling, a Harvard professor who had worked on nuclear war policy for the Defense Department, credited the popular novel Red Alert with making governments more aware of the benefits of direct communication. Parade editor Jess Gorkin lobbied the 1960 presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon and pressed Khrushchev during a U.S. visit. Gerard C. Smith, head of the State Department Policy Planning Staff, proposed direct links; objections from the State Department, the U.S. military and the Kremlin delayed introduction.

The 1963 agreement

On 20 June 1963 representatives of the two countries signed a "Memorandum of Understanding Regarding the Establishment of a Direct Communications Line" at Geneva: Charles C. Stelle for the United States and Semyon K. Tsarapkin for the Soviet Union. It was the first time the two countries formally acted to cut the risk of starting a nuclear war unintentionally.

How it worked

The line was intended for text only, since speech might be misinterpreted. Leaders wrote in their native language and messages were translated at the receiving end: Russian went to Washington, English to Moscow. The first generation used two full-time duplex telegraph circuits. The primary circuit ran from Washington via London, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Helsinki to Moscow, carried from Washington to London by the transatlantic cable TAT-1, with a secondary radio line via Tangier for back-up and service messages. In July 1963 the United States sent four sets of Latin-alphabet teleprinters to Moscow; a month later four sets of East German Siemens teleprinters with the Cyrillic alphabet arrived in Washington. Encryption used a Norwegian-built ETCRRM II device with a shared one-time pad, so that neither country had to reveal more sensitive methods to the other. The line began operating on 30 August 1963.

Use

The first message, sent from Washington on 30 August 1963, was the pangram "THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPED OVER THE LAZY DOG'S BACK 1234567890", in capital letters because the equipment did not support lowercase. The first major event carried was the assassination of President Kennedy that November. Documented uses include the 1967 Six-Day War, when about twenty messages were exchanged in the first day alone and President Lyndon Johnson queried Chairman of the Council of Ministers Alexei Kosygin about fleet movements; the 1968 Apollo 8 mission; the 1971 India-Pakistan war; the 1973 Yom Kippur War; the 1974 Cyprus crisis; the 1979 debate over Afghanistan; the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon; the 1991 Gulf War; the 2001 attacks; and the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq War. On 31 October 2016 it reinforced Barack Obama's September warning that interference on Election Day would be treated as a grave matter.

Testing formed the daily routine: the hotline was tested hourly, with the United States transmitting in even hours and the Soviet Union in odd hours. U.S. test messages drew on Shakespeare, Mark Twain, encyclopedias and a first-aid manual; Soviet tests on Chekhov. The MOLINK (Moscow Link) teams at the Pentagon's National Military Command Center worked eight-hour shifts, a non-commissioned officer tending the equipment and a Russian-speaking officer translating; staff avoided imagery such as Winnie the Pooh because a bear is a Russian national symbol. The primary link was accidentally cut several times, once near Copenhagen by a Danish bulldozer operator and once by a Finnish farmer who ploughed it up.

Technical evolution

In September 1971 the two sides decided to upgrade the system and agreed for the first time on when the line should be used, undertaking to notify each other immediately of any accidental, unauthorized or unexplained nuclear incident. Two U.S. Intelsat and two Soviet Molniya II satellites supplemented the terrestrial circuits, making the radio link via Tangier redundant. In May 1983 President Ronald Reagan proposed adding high-speed facsimile, agreed formally on 17 July 1984 and operational by 1986; the teletype circuits were cut in 1988 and the Soviets moved the link to Gorizont-class geostationary satellites. In 2007 the system was upgraded to a dedicated computer network that began operating on 1 January 2008, keeping the two satellite links but replacing the back-up cable with fibre optics and exchanging messages by secure email.

Cold War legacy

The Republican Party criticized the hotline in its 1964 platform, saying the Kennedy administration had "sought accommodations with Communism without adequate safeguards and compensating gains for freedom" and had opened a "hot line" first with a sworn enemy rather than a proven friend. The link nonetheless became a model of Cold War crisis management. The U.S. and Russian Nuclear Risk Reduction Centers set up after the 1985 Reykjavik Summit are a hotline-type mechanism, and the 2015 Syrian deconfliction line and the deconfliction line opened at the start of the 2022 war in Ukraine extend the same idea. The USSR opened hotlines with France in 1966 and Britain in 1967; Russia has hotlines with India (1995), with China at defence-ministry level (2008) and with NATO.

The 'red telephone' in popular culture

Books, films and games routinely depict the hotline as a red telephone, although it was never a telephone line and no red phones were used. The 1964 films Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove show red telephones, while Tom Clancy's 1991 novel The Sum of All Fears depicts a text-based computer system closer to the real equipment. The image also drove 'red phone' campaign advertisements in the 1984 and 2008 U.S. election primaries.