Today in Technology History
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August 30
On August 30, 1963, a new telephone hotline connecting the superpower governments in Moscow and Washington, D.C. was activated and tested.
The hotline was put in place in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis of late 1962. During that critical situation -- perhaps the closest we have ever come to nuclear war -- messages sent back and forth between U.S. President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Khrushchev required five or six hours each way for transcription, transmission, translation and delivery. In a rapidly developing situation, such delays were intolerable.
It took years of debate, months of negotiation and weeks of technical work to install the hotline connecting the nuclear superpowers. The system was modeled after an emergency command system used to connect 70 U.S. Air Force bases around the world.
The American end of the hotline was installed in the Pentagon; the Soviet end was in the Kremlin. Teletype machines were used at each end of the 10,000 mile circuit. A tape encryption system was used to keep the messages secure. The hotline was active 24 hours a day.
The new hotline could cut down the delays in sending messages from hours to minutes, but it was only used for emergencies. It was first used in June 1967 during the Six Day War in the Middle East, when Kennedy's and Khrushchev's successors (Johnson and Kosygin) discussed a foray of American planes into the Mediterranean to aid an American ship there.
Related link:
Click here to read the original New York Times article about the diplomatic hotline.
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