Next year will mark the 60th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis. The failure of U.S. and Soviet leaders to communicate personally, unambiguously, and with certainty in real time contributed to the misinterpretations and miscalculations that drove the superpowers to the brink of nuclear war. It took up to half a day for messages to travel between respective embassies in the deeply distrustful capitals. The delays added to the mistrust, and the world came within a hair’s breadth of a devastating nuclear exchange. The thin silver lining of the crisis was an increased understanding for both superpowers, as well as the rest of the world, of the need for swift and trusted leadership-level communications.
The resulting Washington-Moscow hotline has served as a model for other bilateral communication links for more than half a century. Although the U.S.-Soviet hotline was popularly referred to as the “red telephone,” this is misleading. What started in 1963 as written messages bounced between Washington and Moscow on trans-Atlantic cables across various nodes in Europe was then upgraded from radio to satellite circuits in 1978, to a high-speed fax service in 1986, and then to fiber-optic-based communications in 2008. Over the last 50 years, other bilateral hotlines have been put in place around the world, all varying in form, function, and level of seniority. However, even if bilateral hotlines existed for all nuclear-armed states, they would no longer meet the needs of a multipolar nuclear world.
