As communication technologies evolved, so did the “hotline.” In 1985, facsimile machines were added, enabling transmission of handwritten messages, maps, charts, and photographs. Then, in 2008, the link was completely upgraded to a secure computer network with email and chat capabilities.
The United States’ first official use of the “hotline” was on November 22, 1963, after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald. The Soviet Union’s first official message was sent on June 5, 1967, following the start of the Six-Day War between Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and Syria.
On October 31, 2016, President Barack Obama used the Direct Communication Link to warn President Vladimir Putin to stop interfering in the US presidential election: “International law, including the law for armed conflict, applies to actions in cyberspace. We will hold Russia to those standards.”
Over the years, the “hotline” has played a critical (if not always accurate) role in several nuclear-war-themed films, including 1964’s “Dr. Strangelove”: “Hello? Eh, hello? Hello, Dmitri? Listen, I can't hear too well, do you suppose you could turn the music down just a little?”
Columbia Pictures even promoted “Dr. Strangelove” as the “hot-line suspense comedy,” and encouraged movie theater owners to set up red “hotline” telephones in their lobbies, which would play a pre-recorded announcement about the upcoming movie when patrons picked up the receiver.
And here is that pre-recorded announcement:
(The flip side of the 45 rpm record used to distribute that announcement was the very 1960s novelty song “Love That Bomb,” recorded especially to promote the dark comedy movie):
Also in 1964, “Fail Safe” showed the president (Henry Fonda), accompanied by his translator Buck (Larry Hagman), talking to his Soviet counterpart on the “hotline” from a bunker deep beneath the White House in order to prevent an accidental nuclear attack from escalating to an all-out nuclear war.
In 2002’s “The Sum of All Fears,” Jack Ryan (Ben Affleck) used the “hotline” (depicted, prematurely, as a chat-based computer platform) to convince Russia’s president (Ciarán Hinds) that a neo-Nazi billionaire is secretly manipulating him and the US president into fighting a nuclear war.
In 2020 and 2021, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs commemorated the anniversary with a tweet (although its graphic misstated the year the “hotline” was converted into an email platform). However, it was noticeably silent on the subject in 2022, 2023, 2024, and again this year.
For more on the history of—and evolving technology behind—the Washington-Moscow Direct Communication Link, see this fact sheet from the online Crypto Museum: www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/hotli...
