Red telephone: Difference between revisions

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Revision as of 09:29, 1 July 2006

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The "'''red telephone'''" is a famous [[hotline]] which links the [[White House]] via [[National Military Command Center]] with [[the Kremlin]] during the [[Cold War]]. It was established in [[1963]] after the [[Cuban missile crisis]] made it clear that reliable, direct communications between the two great [[nuclear weapon|nuclear power]]s 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&mdash;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 [[encrypt]]ed using the theoretically unbreakable [[one-time pad]] system<ref>David Kahn, ''The Codebreakers'', pp. 715&ndash;716</ref>. Initially the red phone was not actually a telephone, but a set of high-speed [[teleprinter]]s, 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. [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2971558.stm]

#REDIRECT [[Hotline]]

==References==

* [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2971558.stm "Cold War hotline recalled"], ''BBC News'', June 7, 2003, retrieved March 24, 2006

==External links==

* [http://www.cdi.org/russia/263-12.cfm Hotline: 40 Years of Building Up Trust]

[[Category:History of foreign relations of the United States]]

[[es:Teléfono rojo]]

[[fr:Téléphone rouge]]