Moscow–Washington hotline
[4] Several people came up with the idea for a hotline, including Harvard professor Thomas Schelling, who had worked on nuclear war policy for the Defense Department previously.
Schelling credited the pop fiction novel Red Alert (the basis of the film Dr. Strangelove) with making governments more aware of the benefit of direct communication between the superpowers.
In addition, Parade editor Jess Gorkin personally badgered 1960 presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, and buttonholed the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during a U.S. visit to adopt the idea.
[1] During this period Gerard C. Smith, as head of the State Department Policy Planning Staff, proposed direct communication links between Moscow and Washington.
During the standoff, official diplomatic messages typically took six hours to deliver; unofficial channels, such as via television network correspondents, had to be used too as they were quicker.
[5] During the crisis, the United States took nearly twelve hours to receive and decode Nikita Khrushchev's 3,000-word-initial settlement message – a dangerously long time.
[citation needed] White House advisers thought faster communications could have averted the crisis, and resolved it quickly.
The two countries signed the Hot Line Agreement on June 20, 1963[6] – the first time they formally took action to cut the risk of starting a nuclear war unintentionally.
[3] The Republican Party criticized the hotline in its 1964 national platform; it said the Kennedy administration had "sought accommodations with Communism without adequate safeguards and compensating gains for freedom.
A month later the Soviet equipment, four sets of East German teleprinters with the Cyrillic alphabet made by Siemens, arrived in Washington.
MOLINK staffers took special care not to include innuendo or literary imagery that could be misinterpreted, such as passages from Winnie the Pooh, given that a bear is considered the national symbol of Russia.
[21] Later, during testing, the Russian translators sent a message asking their American counterparts, "What does it mean when your people say 'The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog'?
[citation needed] The line was used during:[21] On October 31, 2016, the Moscow–Washington hotline was used to reinforce Barack Obama's September warning that the U.S. would consider any interference on Election Day a grave matter.
[29] At the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States and Russia created a deconfliction line to prevent miscalculations or escalation.
The protagonist Jack Ryan then communicates information over the Hotline from the Pentagon's NMCC to both country's leaders that defuses the crisis.
In the 1990 HBO film By Dawn's Early Light, the White House Situation Room equipment that receives the (translated) hotline message, apparently relayed by the Pentagon-NMCC MOLINK team, is depicted as a teleprinter[33] (and not as a fax machine, the technology already in use at the NMCC itself by that year[3]).
In 1984, an advertisement made by Bob Beckel and Roy Spence on behalf of candidate Walter Mondale suggested that "The most awesome, powerful responsibility in the world lies in the hand that picks up this phone."
[36][37] The red phone was also featured prominently in an advertisement from that year targeting President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative.
