The Hot Line
from The Dave Bowman Show
The Washington–Moscow Hotline is one of those Cold War stories that everyone thinks they know, but almost nobody really understands. Ask most people and they will tell you about a red phone, sitting on the president’s desk, ready to ring in the dead of night. The president picks it up, and the voice on the other end is a Soviet premier warning that the missiles are flying. That image is iconic. It is also false. There was never a red phone to Moscow. The Hotline existed, but it was a very different system than the one of popular imagination. It was a tool of caution and discipline, not theatrics. And for sixty years, it has quietly done its job, often in the background of history.
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