The Moscow-Washington hot line is a system that allows direct communication between the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union. It was originally designed by the Harris Corporation and is also known as the “red telephone,” linking the White House via the National Military Command Center with the Kremlin during the Cold War.
The “Hot Line,” as it would come to be known, was established following an agreement on June 20, 1963 by the signing of the “Memorandum of Understanding Regarding the Establishment of a Direct Communications Line” in Geneva, Switzerland, after the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis made it clear that reliable, direct communications between the two nuclear powers was a necessity. White House advisers at the time thought that the crisis could have been more quickly resolved and easily averted if communication had been faster.
The first generation of the hot line had no voice element at all and the memorandum called for a full-time duplex wire telegraph circuit. The first use of the hot line was in 1967, during the six-day Egypt-Israel War, when both superpowers informed each other of military moves that might have been provocative or ambiguous.
