The Washington–Moscow Direct Communications Link

Assembled from 20 blocks · 1 evidence · 10 related

1. Story
2. Established by a memorandum of understanding signed at Geneva in June 1963 and operational from 30 August 1963, and almost always described wrongly. It was not a red telephone and carried no voice: it was a duplex teleprinter circuit, running by landline and undersea cable from Washington through London, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Helsinki to Moscow, with a radio path as backup, and messages were typed, encrypted offline with one-time tapes, and exchanged as text. Text was the point — a written message can be composed carefully, translated exactly and read twice, whereas a voice call between heads of government in a crisis invites improvisation and mistranslation. Its origin is the 1962 crisis, during which the two governments had exchanged messages by public radio broadcast and by diplomatic courier, with delays measured in hours at a moment when decisions were being taken in minutes. The link was tested hourly and upgraded repeatedly, first by satellite in the 1970s.
3. Knowledge
4. The Washington–Moscow Direct Communications Link
5. The Cuban missile crisis
6. Connections
7. The Cuban missile crisis
8. The Washington–Moscow direct link comes into operation
9. The Washington–Moscow Direct Communications Link
10. John F. Kennedy
11. Nikita Khrushchev
12. A U-2 photographs missile construction in western Cuba
13. Cuba
14. The San Cristóbal medium-range missile sites
15. John F. Kennedy
16. Nikita Khrushchev
17. The Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance aircraft
18. The B-59 submarine incident
19. Evidence
20. Named as the principal declassified-document collection behind this pack's account of the crisis, the B-59 submarine incident and the later disclosures about tactical warheads on the island. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted — nsarchive.gwu.edu is blocked by the environment's egress proxy. Everything this pack says about the crisis is from standing knowledge of the published historiography, and the degree of documentary support for the B-59 account in particular is not established here.