30 August
1963 · politics
The Moscow–Washington hotline went live
After the Cuban Missile Crisis nearly went wrong because messages took hours to arrive, a direct link was set up between the Kremlin and the Pentagon. Contrary to every film ever made about it, there was no red telephone — it was a teleprinter, chosen deliberately because written messages cannot be misheard or shouted.
It is a small, sensible, deeply unglamorous piece of engineering that may well have kept the rest of us alive.
“How much did you actually worry about nuclear war at the time?”