Source: Ruptly
The 60th anniversary of the “hot contact” between Moscow and Washington against the background of the Cuban missile crisis in 1963 coincides with the dangerous conditions caused by the crisis in Ukraine, which doubles its significance.
The hot call, metaphorically described as the “red phone”, was inaugurated on August 30, 1963 during the Cold War with the aim of avoiding an accidental outbreak of nuclear war, and was practically used to exchange views in emergency situations on several occasions such as the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy in November 1963. , the war between India and Pakistan in 1971 and during the Six-Day War in 1967, as well as the 1973 war in the Middle East, while the hotline was last used in 2016, when US President Barack Obama called due to alleged reports of hacking attacks on the American elections.
The hot call, for example, was used by the Soviet Union during the setback war in 1967, which is known as the Six-Day War, when in the early morning the US Secretary of Defense at the time, Robert McNamara, woke President Lyndon Johnson, and informed him that Moscow had requested via the hotline to put pressure on Tel Aviv. to stop the war.
The Soviet Union was the initiator in 1954 of proposing a direct emergency contact with the United States against the backdrop of the Korean War to contain any escalation that threatens global peace and stability. Nuclear missiles in Turkey.
The Americans were the ones who initiated the request to establish a direct practical line of communication with Moscow, when the American intelligence services needed 12 hours at the height of the crisis to decipher a 3,000-word message from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, and Moscow accepted the offer.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger later expressed the importance of this measure by saying, “It seems to me that the greatest danger of war is not in the deliberate actions of evil persons, but in the inability to keep events under control.”
When the “hot line” is mentioned, “red phone” automatically comes to mind. However, Moscow and Washington initially used the telegraph for emergency communication, and in 1986 a fax was connected to it. Until 1991, the leaders of the two countries communicated only by text messages. .
The two sides exchanged messages that carried phrases that could not be interpreted after being encrypted in several stages, via the “hot line” via a cable at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean with a length of 16,000 kilometers, passing through London, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Helsinki, and the American receiver was installed in the Pentagon, and it is serviced by two people around the clock The watch, two operator and interpreter.