The Washington–Moscow Hotline is one of those Cold War stories that everyone thinks they know, but almost nobody really understands. Ask most people and they will tell you about a red phone, sitting on the president’s desk, ready to ring in the dead of night. The president picks it up, and the voice on the other end is a Soviet premier warning that the missiles are flying. That image is iconic. It is also false. There was never a red phone to Moscow. The Hotline existed, but it was a very different system than the one of popular imagination. It was a tool of caution and discipline, not theatrics. And for sixty years, it has quietly done its job, often in the background of history.
