The Infamous ‘Red Phone’ – The American Spectator

Married life and foreign relations aren’t entirely unrelated — both depend on good communication.

That was the conclusion Russia and the United States came to in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis when the two powers came incredibly close to exchanging nuclear warheads.

An SS-4 Sandal MRBM carrying a thermonuclear warhead weighing up to 2.3 megatons would have taken approximately 13 minutes to reach Washington, D.C., from Cuba in 1962.

So when an American U-2 spy plane secretly photographed a Soviet missile site in Cuba, the American government was understandably nervous. President John F. Kennedy eventually decided to create a naval blockade to prevent weapons from flowing into the island country from Russia, and he refused to move the blockade until Russia promised to dismantle the sites and remove the missiles.

Nikita Khrushchev was frustrated by the U.S.’s demands — after all, American missiles had been strategically located in Turkey for years. That being said, neither country really wanted a nuclear war, and so Russia agreed that it would remove the missiles if the U.S. promised not to invade Cuba and, as it later turned out, if it agreed to remove its nuclear weapons from Turkey.

Although Russia and the U.S. reached a peaceful conclusion — singing a nuclear test-ban treaty on Aug. 5, 1963 — it hadn’t been without difficulty. The diplomatic exchange between the two nations was tedious and prone to mistakes. An encrypted message had to be relayed over telegraph or radio between them, and it took the U.S. more than 12 hours to receive and decode Nikita Khrushchev’s initial settlement message (a 3,000-word missive that demanded the U.S. remove nukes from Turkey). (READ MORE: The Great Lesson: Statue of Stalin Consecrated in Russia)

Fearful that future “misunderstandings” could cause an actual nuclear war, the White House established a hotline between the U.S. and its chief geopolitical rival on Aug. 30, 1963.

The process was slightly more complicated than the popular imagination would have one believe — it wasn’t exactly as easy as picking up the phone, but it was close. The president would call the Pentagon with his message; military operators would then receive the message, encrypt it, and then feed it into a transmitter. Within minutes, the encrypted message would arrive at the Kremlin.

Kennedy got the chance to use his fancy new tool just once — transmitting the message “THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPED OVER THE LAZY DOG’S BACK 1234567890.” What he got back from Russia was garbled nonsense; a few kinks still needed to be worked out. (READ MORE: The War in Ukraine Is No Game of Drones)

Just two months later, Kennedy was assassinated, leaving it to Lyndon B. Johnson to send the first order of real business. During the Six-Day War in the Mediterranean, LBJ called Russia to let the Kremlin know he was considering sending U.S. military planes to the region.

In popular culture, the line became known as the “Red Phone,” and the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum still display one to this day. Oddly enough, the phone in question at the White House was never red — it was black, just like every other phone.

This article originally appeared on Aubrey’s Substack, Pilgrim’s Way, on Aug. 27, 2023.