![]() Soon after the agreement, four American-made teletype machines were flown to Moscow and installed in the Kremlin. Messages sent to the Soviet Union on the wire telegraph circuit were routed on a 10,000-mile-long transatlantic cable from Washington to London to Copenhagen to Stockholm to Helsinki and finally to Moscow. The use of the word “direct” in the memo’s title was a bit misleading there was no red phone involved. ![]() ![]() The two nations signed it 50 years ago this month, on June 20, 1963. “For use in time of emergency the Government of the United States of America and the Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics have agreed to establish as soon as technically feasible a direct communications link between the two Governments,” the “Memorandum of Understanding” opens. To allow for this system, Soviet and American negotiators produced a memorandum, “Regard the Establishment of a Direct Communications Link.” The best that could be done was the installation of two terminal points with teletype equipment, a full-time duplex wire telegraph circuit and a full-time radiotelegraph circuit. Such technology was not available, however. The United States and the Soviet Union were both inspired to reduce the risk of another confrontation picking up a phone seemed like a good idea. ![]() Apart from avoiding worldwide destruction, there was one other silver lining to the Cuban Missile Crisis: it persuaded the two nuclear superpowers that they had to find a better way to communicate.Įven though the idea of a proscribed diplomatic communication system had been discussed in the past, especially in the years since Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, it took the Crisis itself to bring the idea to fruition. ![]()
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