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Saturday, June 20, 2009

"The Red Telephone"

The "Hot Line", as it would come to be known, was established following an agreement on June 20, 1963 by the signing of the "Memorandum of Understanding Regarding the Establishment of a Direct Communications Line" in Geneva, Switzerland, by spokesmen from both the Soviet Union and the United States, after the events of the Cuban missile crisis made it clear that reliable, direct communications between the two nuclear powers was a necessity. During the crisis, it took the U.S. nearly 12 hours to receive and decode Nikita Khruschev's 3,000 word initial settlement message—a dangerously long time in the chronology of nuclear brinkmanship. By the time the U.S. had drafted a reply, a tougher message from Moscow had been received demanding that U.S. missiles be removed from Turkey. White House advisors at the time thought that the crisis could have been more quickly resolved and easily averted if communication had been faster. This link was encrypted using the information-theoretically secure one-time pad cryptosystem.

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