The Moscow-Washington hotline is established - August 30th, 1963

On this day in 1963, the first message was sent on the Moscow-to-Washington hotline.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio,
Hello and Welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show the de Code's history one Day at a Time.
I'm Gabe Lusier, and in this episode we're talking about
the legendary Red Phone, a special communications system designed to

(00:23):
keep two nuclear superpowers from accidentally blowing up the planet.
The day was August thirtieth, nineteen sixty three. The first
message was transmitted on the Moscow to Washington hotline. The
communication system was installed to alleviate tensions and reduce the

(00:47):
risk of an accidental nuclear war by establishing a direct
line between the leaders of the United States and the
Soviet Union. The Soviets had first proposed such a measure
back in the mid nineteen fifties, but it wouldn't be
put into action until after the Cuban Missile Crisis of
nineteen sixty two, which had brought the nations to the

(01:07):
brink of nuclear war. The crisis began when the American
government learned that the Soviets had secretly planted nuclear capable
missiles on the island of Cuba, just ninety miles off
the US coast. What followed was a tense thirteen day
standoff between President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

(01:30):
The crisis was made far worse by the slow and
cumbersome communication systems through which diplomatic messages were conveyed between
the nations. The encrypted messages had to be sent by
telegraph or radio transmission and often took as long as
six hours to reach their destination, and that's not even
counting the time that operators spent decrypting and translating the messages,

(01:54):
which were always dispatched in the language of the sender.
For example, it took more than more than twelve hours
to process Khrushchev's three thousand word opening message to JFK,
and by the time it was finished, a second, angrier
message had already arrived. Despite those strained exchanges, Kennedy and

(02:15):
Khrushev managed to resolve the crisis peacefully, and in the
aftermath both sides agreed that a new method of communication
was needed to prevent future confrontations. Being able to just
pick up the phone would have been ideal, but the
technology of the era wouldn't allow for it. Transatlantic phone
calls were thought to be too unreliable and prone to

(02:37):
interception to be counted on in emergency situations, not to
mention that other parties would have to translate for the
leaders in real time, increasing the odds of misunderstandings and
heated displays of emotion. Instead, the countries looked for ways
to speed up written communication rather than verbal. It took

(02:58):
about nine months for the two sides to hammer out
the details, but finally, on June twentieth, nineteen sixty three,
they signed a formal agreement regarding the establishment of a
direct communications link, or hotline. The agreement stipulated that each
side would provide the other with a special teletype machine

(03:18):
through which written messages could be sent directly to official translators.
In addition to the main terminals, the nations also exchanged
a year's supply of tape, ink and replacement parts, as
well as an encryption machine to ensure the secrecy of
all communication and to avoid any accusations of tampering. The

(03:38):
encryption equipment was sourced from Norway, a neutral third party.
It took a couple months to get the system up
and running, but on August thirtieth, nineteen sixty three, the
Moscow Washington hotline finally went live. The first message sent
that day came from the United States, and it read
as follows, quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's

(04:03):
back one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight nine zero.
The operators wanted to test that every key was working properly,
so they chose a phrase that contained all the letters
of the alphabet and every Arabic numeral, plus an apostrophe.
The Soviet response was more poetic than practical, consisting of

(04:26):
a long description of a beautiful sunset in Moscow. Apart
from test messages, the system was to be used only
for emergencies, and so wasn't given a permanent place in
the Oval Office. Instead, the US hotline was installed at
the National Military Commands Center at the Pentagon. Anytime the

(04:47):
President wished to send a message, they would first relay
it to the Pentagon over the phone. Next, the message
would be immediately entered into the teletype machine at the Pentagon,
and finally it would be encrypted, fed into a transmitter,
and then printed out on the corresponding machine in the
Kremlin just a few minutes later. Although not quite as

(05:09):
snappy as text messages or email, the technology was a
major step forward for its time. And made international communication
easier and faster than ever before. The first US president
to send a message via the hot line was actually
Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. During the nineteen sixty seven

(05:29):
Six Day War between Israel and Egypt, Johnson notified Soviet
Premier Alexei Koseigan that he was considering sending US troops
into the region. The hot line has been upgraded a
great deal since then. In nineteen seventy one, a phone
line was added, as well as a satellite communication line

(05:49):
to complement the main telegraph line. Then in nineteen seventy eight,
a second terminal was installed at the White House, along
with a third at a military command center not far
from Camp David. In the nineteen eighties, the hot line
was updated to send messages by facts rather than teletype,
and since two thousand and eight, messages have been transmitted

(06:11):
by computer. There's a widespread myth that the hot line
was actually just a red telephone which the President could
pick up any time and be immediately connected to the Kremlin.
But while the system was sometimes referred to as the
Red Phone, it was after all used to communicate with
the Reds. The original hotline didn't involve a phone at all.

(06:35):
The confusion mostly stems from high profile films and TV
shows of the nineteen sixties and seventies, in which a
high stakes hotline system was depicted as a simple telephone,
usually a red one. Popular examples of this post crisis
trope include movies like Failsafe, James Bond, and Doctor Strangelove,

(06:56):
as well as the live action Batman TV series starring
at Although to be fair, red telephones have been used
in real politically important discussions, they just weren't a part
of the Moscow Washington hotline. More than sixty years later,
the channel between the US and Russia remains open, and

(07:19):
while it hasn't seen much official action since the end
of the Cold War, the hotline is still staffed around
the clock and tested hourly to ensure its functionality. Every
even hour, the Pentagon sends a message, and every odd
hour Moscow sends a response. There is no formal script
for the operators to follow, but since the message has

(07:41):
to say something, they like to send things that are
fun or challenging to translate. Sometimes they'll exchange literary excerpts,
with the Americans sending Mark Twain and the Russians responding
with Dostoyevsky. Other times they'll trade encyclopedia entries or magazine articles.
On truly special occasions, they've even been known to swap

(08:03):
recipes for chili ah the Wonders of Diplomacy. I'm Gabe Bluesyay,
and hopefully you now know a little more about history
today than you did yesterday. If you'd like to keep
up with the show, you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook,

(08:24):
and Instagram at TDI HC Show, and if you have
any comments or suggestions, feel free to send them my
way by writing to This Day at iHeartMedia dot com.
Thanks to Kasby Bias for producing the show, and thanks
to you for listening. I'll see you back here again
tomorrow for another day in History class.