The Moscow-Washington hotline went into operation
On this day · 30 August 1963
Born of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the direct link between superpowers opened not with a phone call but with a typed nonsense sentence.
On August 30, 1963, the direct communications link between Washington and Moscow, soon known simply as the hotline, began operating. It grew directly out of the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when messages between the two governments took hours to relay and decode, a dangerous lag with nuclear war in the balance.
The two sides signed a Memorandum of Understanding in Geneva on June 20, 1963, agreeing to establish the link to reduce the risk of war by accident or miscalculation. Despite its “red telephone” reputation, it was never a phone line.
The first transmission was a test pangram: “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’s back 1234567890.”
The original system used teletype equipment, routed through a wire circuit from Washington via London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Helsinki to Moscow. It shifted to fax machines in 1986 and has been modernized several times since.
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