Was the Moscow–Washington hotline a red phone?

Why the capitals wanted a wire

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy and Khrushchev talked mostly by letter, and letters were slow. Khrushchev’s long message of October 26, 1962, came in piece by piece; on October 28 he had his answer read on Radio Moscow because a cable would have taken too long. Both governments drew the same conclusion. Kennedy said so in his commencement speech at American University on June 10, 1963:

One step in this direction is the proposed arrangement for a direct line between Moscow and Washington, to avoid on each side the dangerous delays, misunderstandings, and misreadings of the other’s actions which might occur at a time of crisis.

Ten days later, on June 20, American and Soviet delegates at the disarmament talks in Geneva signed a one-page memorandum. Its first words give the purpose: “For use in time of emergency.”

What the hotline really was

The annex to that memorandum describes the hardware, and none of it is a telephone. Each end had a terminal with “telegraph-teleprinter equipment.” Messages ran on a full-time wire circuit routed Washington, London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki, Moscow, while a radio circuit through Tangier carried the operators’ own coordination and stood ready if the cable broke. Moscow wrote in Russian and Washington in English, so each side translated what it received.

The two governments even swapped machines. The Soviets supplied Russian-language teleprinters for the American end, the Americans supplied English-language ones for Moscow, and both ends had encryption equipment, with the coded keying tapes delivered through the embassies. On the American side the terminal sat in the Pentagon. In 1963 there was no telephone to the Kremlin on the president’s desk, red or any other color.

The quick brown fox

The line went into service at the end of the summer of 1963. Its first test was a typists’ drill, the English sentence about a quick brown fox and a lazy dog, built to use every letter on the keyboard. The first real emergency came in June 1967, when the Soviet premier, Alexei Kosygin, and President Lyndon Johnson exchanged messages over it during the Six-Day War in the Middle East.

The link kept changing with the technology. An agreement of 1971 added two satellite circuits, one chosen by each side. Another, in 1984, added facsimile machines, “in addition to the current teletype Direct Communications Link,” as its text puts it. Through the Cold War the hotline stayed a written channel, typed and later faxed.

Where the red phone came from

From the movies, the year after the line opened. In January 1964 Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove showed an American president in a vast war room calling the Soviet premier on the hot line telephone. That October Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe, based on a 1962 novel, put another fictional president on the phone to Moscow, with an interpreter beside him. Audiences remembered the telephone, and the teleprinter was forgotten.

The real wire mattered for a reason the films got right: in a world of mutually assured destruction, a misunderstanding could be fatal. It was one of the lasting results of the deal that ended the crisis and the months of fear before it.