Moscow–Washington hotline

As Hotline (English: hotline ) or Red Phone was designated a permanent teleprinter connection between the Soviet Union and the United States.

Facility

The connection has been established based on the experience of the Cuban Missile Crisis ( October 16 to 28 1962). It runs through London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki and was opened on 30 August 1963. In parallel, there was a radio link via Tangier. In 1966, a compound of the United States with France, in 1967 with Great Britain. The compounds should provide the opportunity to prevent a threat to peace by mistakes, misunderstandings or delays in the communication path.

The fact that this was a danger shows an incident of 26 September 1983: at that time reported the Soviet missile defense falsely attack by U.S. ICBMs the Soviet Union (see the article on Stanislav Petrov Yevgrafovich ).

Both sides went for the highest possible security against eavesdropping or tampering of messages transmitted. There came the encryption technique of one- time pads are used - one of the few known applications of the method, which although provides absolute security, but in practice usually is hardly feasible.

To exclude technical reasons, transmission errors, checked to the line regularly. In the past, this was done by the test text for telex described in ITU- T Recommendation R.52 since 1988 were each sent to the far side ( the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, translated into German "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog ​​" ). This test text contains all displayable characters of a teletypewriter (called a pangram ).

First use

After installation, the connection between USA and the Soviet Union was four years not used. Robert McNamara, former Secretary of Defense, described the first use of the red phone in his memoirs: A few hours after the outbreak of the Six Day War, he received on June 5, 1967 against eight clock in the morning local time, at the Pentagon a call of duty general. This informed the astonished defense minister that the Soviet Prime Minister Kosygin wanted to speak to President Lyndon B. Johnson. McNamara did not know until that time that the lines of the Telegraph ended under his office. He woke up and informed the President; The compound was used several times during the war.

Others

In many films of recent decades one sees the red phone on desks of diplomats and military. It is represented as a direct line of the respective government officials to the office of the supreme leaders. For the Americans, this is the President. The Red Telephone served over the years to mitigate multiple crises and is still used for direct communication between different governments.

Many people think the term Red phone only to a connection between the USA and the USSR (or since the collapse of Russia) and to a phone, not even a telex connection.

The People's Republic of China has with the USA a similar compound.