(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...

And see also: www.electrospaces.net/2012/10/the-...