Hot wire

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As Hot Wire ( Engl. Hotline ) or Red Phone was a permanent telegraph connection between the Soviet Union and the United States during the time of the Cold War called.

A red phone from the time of Jimmy Carter , which was never part of the hot line, but only on the American Defense Red Switch Network .

Facility

The connection was established on the basis of experiences from the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 14-28, 1962). It runs through London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki and opened on August 30, 1963. At the same time, there was a radio link via Tangier . In 1966 there was a connection between the USA and France , and in 1967 with Great Britain . The connections are intended to create the possibility of preventing peace from being jeopardized by errors, misunderstandings or delays in the communication path.

An incident on September 26, 1983 shows that this danger persisted: at that time the Soviet missile defense falsely reported an attack by US ICBMs on the Soviet Union (see the article on Stanislav Evgrafowitsch Petrov ).

Both sides strived for the highest possible security against eavesdropping or falsification of the transmitted messages. The One-Time-Pad encryption technology was used - one of the few known applications of the method, which offers absolute security, but is difficult to implement in practice due to the complex key exchange.

In order to rule out transmission errors due to technical reasons, the line was checked regularly. In the past, this was done by sending the test text for telex connections described in ITU-T recommendation R.52 since 1988 to the other 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 letters of a teletype machine (a so-called pangram ).

First use

After the installation, the connection between the USA and the Soviet Union was not used for four years. Robert McNamara , then Secretary of Defense of the United States, described the first use of the red telephone in his memoirs: A few hours after the outbreak of the Six Day War , he received a call from the general on duty at the Pentagon on June 5, 1967 at around 8 a.m. local time . He informed the astonished Minister of Defense that the Soviet Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin wanted to speak to President Lyndon B. Johnson . Little did McNamara know that the teletype lines ended under his office. He woke up and informed the President; the compound was used several times during the war.

reactivation

Tu-95MS , off Scotland 2014,
photographed by RAF interceptors

Over 20 years after the end of the Cold War, Russia and NATO reestablished a direct link between their general staffs in 2015. The then German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier (SPD) had suggested in December 2014 , due to the tensions in connection with the Ukraine crisis , to re-establish a permanent connection for crises.

Both the NATO Commander in Chief for Europe and the chairman of the NATO Military Committee have permission to communicate with the Russian Commander in Chief, NATO said. The communication channels are open at all times and are regularly tested.

Others

In March 2014, Barack Obama spoke to Vladimir Putin on the phone about the situation in Ukraine

Direct telephone connections have also been established between other important nodes in the military decision-making machine. One of these phones was red with a black dial with no dial and said "White House Hot Line". It linked the North American Aerospace Defense Command to the White House in 1963 and was only seen publicly for a few months over 50 years later. It was a telephone before the establishment of AUTOSEVOCOM and other systems whose devices etc. a. were red, yellow or any other color.

In numerous films over the last few decades you can see the red telephone on the desks of high-ranking diplomats and the military. It is presented as a direct line of the respective person to the office of the highest military superior . For Americans, that's the president.

When it comes to the term red telephone, many people only think of a connection between the USA and the USSR (or, since its collapse , Russia) and a telephone, not a telex connection.

The People's Republic of China has a similar relationship with the United States.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Deutsche Welle: Calendar sheet as of August 30 , accessed on August 31, 2011
  2. ↑ ITU-T Recommendation R.52: Standardization of international texts for the measurement of the margin of start-stop equipment
  3. ↑ Russia: NATO reactivates the red telephone . In: The time . May 3, 2015, ISSN  0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed April 21, 2017]).
  4. ↑ Kalyn McMackin: Colorado Springs museum opens new exhibit highlighting NORAD. , fox21news.com, February 21, 2016, (English; HTML with photo), accessed November 5, 2016
  5. ↑ Megan Geuss: King under the mountain. Building Colorado's Cold War command center . arsTECHNICA.com, April 24, 2016, (English; HTML and photo), accessed on November 5, 2016
  6. ↑ US State Department red phones . electrospaces.net, latest version October 29, 2016, first version February 14, 2013. HTML, accessed November 5, 2016
  7. ↑ Spiegel Online, Hamburg Germany: “Hot Wire” in the Cold War: When the Russian calls - Spiegel Online - one day. August 29, 2013. Retrieved April 21, 2017 .
  8. ↑ SinoDefence.com (UK): Military Hotline Activated Between China and the United States. WordPress.com, April 12, 2008, archived from the original on July 15, 2012 ; accessed on August 12, 2008 .