In those years when it seemed so The Third World War was just around the cornerand with the United States or the USSR, or possibly both at the same time, on the verge of pressing the dreaded nuclear button at every spark, The world’s hope was pinned on the so-called “red telephone.”
One of the terminals, and perhaps the most symbolic of all, was in Berlin in the 1970s, the Berlin of the Wall, the point on the planet that best represented the tension between the two blocs.
But that famous red telephone It wasn’t a telephone and of course it wasn’t red.but an ugly Hulk looking Typewriter, three keys on the left and a slot which can now also be visited in Spain.
It is technically known as “Direct telex between Moscow and Washington”was built in 1979 and is featured in the Berlin Wall exhibition, which can be visited in the Madrid Canal facilities.
In reality it is direct connection between Washington and Moscow It had been published 16 years earlier, at the height of the Cold War, after the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis was intended to provoke a confrontation between the two nuclear powers over some Soviet bases discovered on the Cuban island.
Moscow and Washington need a direct line
The conflicting messages, the misunderstandings and the obvious personal dispute between John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev kept the world on tenterhooks and demonstrated this The Kremlin and the White House needed a direct and confidential line through which one can communicate, as an antidote to pressing the nuclear button. This is where the myth of the red telephone was born.
This direct connection transmitted the news not by voice, but by teleprinters, which were posted with a cryptic-looking message: “The quick brown fox jumped onto the lazy dog’s back.” (“The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’s back”). It was nothing more than a sentence containing all the letters of the English alphabet, since the target was exactly something as common as Check if all buttons worked. And then of course a “1234567890”, which also checked whether all numbers can be used.
From then on, the device was used twenty times during the 1967 Six-Day War, which pitted Israel against a coalition of Arab countries. At the time, it was very useful for the Kremlin to tell Washington that it had no intention of continuing to burn the region.
The direct thread, as American and Russian sources have confirmed, was used at least in half a dozen more times (the India-Pakistan War of 1971, the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and the Lebanon War of 1983, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 or the USSR’s tensions with Poland in the early 1980s years).
Since then, two other American presidents (father and son of Bush), Gorbachev and Putin (the latter on 9/11), have used this red phone.
From Washington to Moscow with four stops
Originally, this direct connection consisted of two full-duplex telex stations and a cable telegraph line that ran along the Washington-London-Copenhagen-Stockholm-Helsinki-Moscow route and was supplemented by another Washington-Tangier radio telegraph line. Moscow.
As the Sputnik agency explained at the time, every page of the ticker was It had two teleprinters with the Latin alphabet and two with the Cyrillic alphabet. Messages would be sent and received in both Russian and English to protect against translation errors. In addition, each page was protected by a pair of ETCRRM offline/online one-time tape (OTT) encryption machines developed in 1953 by the Norwegian company Standard Telefon og Kabelfabrik A/S (STK).
The Russian (Cyrillic) teleprinter in Berlin was a T-63 from Siemens (formerly known as Siemens & Halske), which was delivered to the Pentagon on August 26, 1963. From there the test message “Fast Brown Fox” was sent. The Soviet side responded with a poetic description of a Moscow sunset that used all letters of the Cyrillic alphabet equally, according to Sputnik.
According to various information, the terminal in the Kremlin was located in a room near the presidential office. In the United States it is believed that there were four terminals. Over the years, the devices have been improved through successive agreements between both countries.
In all cases there was three types of messages: evidence, such as the first text mentioned above that dealt with nature, art or music; of the service, with technical references to the devices; and from the government, sent on direct orders from both presidents.
The information that arrived through the Berlin terminal and emerged through the small slit to the left of the huge device could be crucial to the fate of humanity, especially in the most critical moments when it seemed so mythical at the time checkpoint Charlie The fuse of World War III could be lit.