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US-Russia hotline rings again amid nuclear threats

In the movies it’s just a “red phone”. But in reality it is the means of communication in crisis situations between Washington and Moscow, which began during the Cold War and have resumed amid Russian threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

Jake Sullivan, the president’s top security adviser USA Joe Biden confirmed it. To the reporter who asked him if “the red phone is working again”, he replied on September 25 to the American news network NBC: “The answer to your question is: yes”.

“We have the ability to speak directly at a high level (to the Russians), to tell them clearly what our message is and to listen to theirs,” he clarified, as reported by the Athens News Agency. “It’s happened frequently in the last few months, it’s happened even in the last few days,” said Sullivan, who declined to elaborate on the exact nature of the communications channels used to “protect” them, nor on the frequency of the communications.

The term “red phone” has, over time, come to refer to all high-level confidential contacts of an urgent nature between the US and of Russia.

USA - Russia

Missile Crisis

However, it was originally a very specific device that was first used in 1963 between the United States of America and the Soviet Union.

In October 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis shocked the entire world.

The absence of direct communication favors speculation about the intentions of the opposing camp, and thus the risk of nuclear escalation. It then takes several hours to transmit, translate and encrypt the messages between Moscow and Washington.

After that crisis, the two countries negotiated, down to the smallest detail, the creation of a system of rapid and direct communication, extremely secure.

The “Memorandum of Understanding between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Concerning the Establishment of a Direct Communication Link,” the first bilateral treaty between the two powers, was signed in Geneva on June 20, 1963.

In the movie “Doctor Strangelove”, US President Merkin Muffley (a fictional character) has a hilarious phone conversation with “Dmitri” in Moscow about an impending nuclear holocaust.

In fact, the two capitals communicate by written messages, coded and transmitted by a cable thousands of kilometers long (Washington-London-Copenhagen-Stockholm-Helsinki-Moscow) and by a radio circuit.

According to a 2013 Smithsonian magazine article, the first message sent by Americans is: “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’s back 1234567890.” Which doesn’t mean much, but has the advantage of using all possible characters to test the communication system.

The system was modernized in 1971, replaced by satellite connections and terminals installed in the two countries — on the American side, the connection reached the Pentagon, itself connected to the White House operations room, the “Situation Room”.

Shakespeare and Chekhov

In a 1988 article, the New York Times Magazine compared the Pentagon room to “the computer room of a well-equipped high school” and recounted how the system was tested every hour, every day, with non-news messages: “Americans send some times Shakespeare, the Russians Chekhov”.

In 1994, a new system enabled Defense officials of the two countries to be almost permanently accessible.

The United States has always kept secret the number of uses of this secure connection.

It was used in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and then in the 1973 war, according to the State Department.

The line would have been “reheated”, according to various press reports, during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and would have been used extensively during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, with communications regarding Lebanon and Poland.

According to NBC and the Washington Post, former US President Barack Obama used the “red phone” – actually a highly secure email – on October 31, 2016, to warn Vladimir Putin about possible Russian meddling in the upcoming presidential election in the United States.

Source: News Beast

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