Established during the Cold War, a direct connection between Moscow and Washington ensures that misunderstandings are avoided. Through communication, the great powers want to avoid the escalation of military conflicts. The United States now resorts to this possibility more often.
The "red telephone" is ringing more frequently again: Because of the Russian threats to use nuclear weapons in the Ukraine war, the USA is currently increasingly using the direct communication channel with Moscow, also known as the "hot line". The administration of US President Joe Biden warns Russia against actually using nuclear weapons.
"We have the ability to speak directly at high levels and be clear with our messages to them," Biden's national security adviser Jake Sullivan recently told NBC. "That's happened a lot in the past few months. It's also happened in the past few days." It is made clear to Russia that "catastrophic" consequences are imminent if the country "takes the dark path of using nuclear weapons."
Unlike in many films, a red telephone is not actually used in the conversations. Rather, it is an image of the highly secured contacts between historical rivals. The hotline was established after the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in October 1962. The USA and the Soviet Union agreed that they urgently needed to do something to make each other reachable. So Washington and Moscow set up a direct line of communication between the superpowers to clear up misunderstandings about a possible impending nuclear attack.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, it took hours for the messages to be delivered and translated. For example, a letter dated October 26, 1962, in which the Soviet Union hinted at a political solution, arrived at the US Embassy in Moscow at 9:42 am Washington time. When the letter finally reached the US State Department, translated and encrypted, it was after 9:00 p.m. "World peace hung by a thread, but it took almost twelve hours to get a message across from one superpower to another," wrote US author Michael Dobbs in his book One Minute to Midnight.
The "hot line" between Washington and Moscow was established on August 30, 1963. At first it wasn't really a red phone, but a wired connection for written messages. The first text sent from the USA read: "The swift brown fox jumped over the back of the lazy dog 1234567890" - a sentence without any meaning, which is said to have caused some guesswork on the Soviet side, but which in English contains all the letters of the alphabet and contains all digits.
Only in the 1970s was a satellite telephone line added. In 1994, a new system allowed defense officials from both countries to contact each other almost constantly. The US is silent about how often the "Red Telephone" was actually used. However, US and Soviet leaders communicated through direct lines during the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars and the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
The "Red Telephone" served as a model for similar connections between Moscow and Western European capitals during the Cold War. China established such a channel with Russia and the United States in the mid-1990s. Rival nuclear powers India and Pakistan did so in 2005.
