The Curious History of the Hot Line

The hot line originally relied on teletype machines like this one (not the red telephones of legend).

(Bettmann/Corbis)

Everybody knows the hot line best from the movies. In the 1964 Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove, the President of the United States, played by Peter Sellers, picks up the phone and calls the premier of the Soviet Union. “Now then, Dmitri,” Sellers says, “you know how we’ve always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the bomb . . .” In reality, it was never that simple. When the communications system, officially known as MOLINK, was born—44 years ago this month—there wasn’t even a phone involved.

The need for something like MOLINK, government shorthand for “Moscow Link,” was understood before the Cuban Missile Crisis, but that confrontation made it much more urgent. During those tense 13 days in October 1962, getting messages back and forth between Nikita Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy, through intermediaries, was a slow and arduous process. Receiving, translating, and drafting a response to Khrushchev’s initial 3,000-word settlement proposal took so long that a second message—demanding that the U.S. remove missiles from Turkey—was received before the first could even be answered. After the crisis was resolved, Kennedy’s advisers strongly urged the development of a new, faster way to communicate.

To that end, representatives from both nations drafted and signed an agreement in Geneva in June 1963 to establish a direct communication link. It was to consist of two teletype terminals, one in Washington (or, strictly speaking, the Pentagon, in Virginia), one in Moscow, allowing for careful written communications. It would be connected by a wire circuit that would extend underwater and through London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Helsinki; there would also be a backup radiotelegraph circuit, via Tangier. The MOLINK system was up and running in the Pentagon and Moscow by the end of August 1963, 44 years ago this month.

For several years the system was often tested but never actually used. The first President to use it was Lyndon Johnson. As he later recalled, in the early morning of June 5, 1967, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara telephoned him to say, “Mr. President, the hot line is up!” Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin had sent a message on it saying he wished to communicate with the President. Johnson was surprised, and more than a little irritated at having been woken. “What do you think I should say?” he asked McNamara. “I think you should say that you’ll be available for consultations with him in 20 minutes,” the Defense Secretary replied. It turned out that Kosygin wanted to confer about new hostilities between Israel and its Arab neighbors—what would soon be known as the Six-Day War. Nineteen more messages were sent back and forth during the conflict via teletype machines, with the leaders mainly cautioning each other about the movements of their respective Mediterranean fleets.

President Richard Nixon used MOLINK next, during the 1971 war between India and Pakistan. Two years later, the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev employed it when the United States went on nuclear alert during the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East. It was, Nixon later said, “perhaps the most serious threat to U.S.–Soviet relations since the Cuban Missile Crisis eleven years before.” Again, the near-instantaneous communication capabilities of MOLINK helped prevent escalation.

In the 1970s, the wire- and radio-based system was overhauled to use satellite relays. Only around then were the teletypes supplemented by telephones. But ease of communication does not always guarantee better communication. According to a former Kremlin aide, when President Jimmy Carter used MOLINK to ask Brezhnev if the Soviets were preparing to invade Afghanistan, in 1979, the Soviet leader said, “Really? I hadn’t heard. Let me ask the defense minister.” Brezhnev then pretended to consult with that aide before telling Carter that “the minister here says no such thing is going on.” The Soviets invaded Afghanistan within days. President Ronald Reagan also reportedly used MOLINK to threaten the Soviets with “serious and far-reaching consequences” for their 1986 detention of an American journalist, Nicholas Daniloff.

Although the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, MOLINK, a relic of the Cold War, survives. Operators on both ends of the line send test messages back and forth on an hourly basis, 24 hours a day. As current Secretary of Defense and former Director of Central Intelligence Robert Gates once said, the hot line will continue to exist “as long as these two sides have submarines roaming the oceans and missiles pointed at each other.”

—David Rapp has written about history for American Heritage, Technology Review, and Out.