Hot Line : Superpowers Chat of War, Golf, Salt

They arm against each other, they threaten and denounce each other, they spy, issue ultimatums, draw lines and thoroughly distrust each other. Through it all, they stay in touch.

Every hour of every day, whether Armageddon looms or recedes, they communicate by satellites 600 and 22,500 miles above the Earth.

Washington to Moscow:

“Interference by casual water, ground repair or a hole, cast or runway made by a burrowing animal, a reptile or a bird occurs when a ball lies in or touches any of these conditions or when the condition interferes with the player’s stance. . . . A ball is ‘lost’ if (a) it is not found or. . . .”

Moscow to Washington:

“So-called simple machines were developed in the cradles of civilization. . . . Not only the simple implements for lifting water (the shadoof ) in Egypt and the ( chigir in Mesopotamia) but also the so-called sakiz .”

Although this may suggest a celestial game of trivia, it is part of a serious business. The messages belong to a varied repertory of texts used to test the “hot line,” the direct, secret form of communication by which the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union hope to avoid unintentional war while not forswearing intentional war.

It is one of several ways the two superpowers have agreed to try to prevent war by accident, mistake or misunderstanding. It is a process that operates quietly, well below the passing thunder of Cold War rhetoric.

“The greatest danger of war,” said Henry A. Kissinger, the former secretary of state, “seems to me not to be in the deliberate actions of wicked men, but in the inability of harassed men to manage events that have run away with them.”

The hot line is intended to keep an avenue open by which opposing leaders can reach each other quickly and privately, away from public scrutiny and pressure, to control events that might otherwise make a mushroom cloud out of a molehill.

To make sure the line is working, the Pentagon sends a test message every even hour on the hour. Every odd hour on the hour, the Soviets send one back. Each side transmits in code and supplies the other with the decoding formula. This makes for a split-level Cold War; the global pursuit of secrets and spies continues on land, sea and air, but in this instance the opposing protagonists share codes.

Although they rarely run out of things to say about each other, they do face a problem in what to say to each other, every hour of every day. By agreement, the test messages carefully avoid anything political or controversial.

So the Pentagon has sent the Kremlin the rules of golf, which the Soviets do not play, making the message a good test of their translators as well as the hot line. Moscow has returned the favor with an esoteric view of the inventive genius of the ancients.

Washington has discoursed on the glories of chili, which the Soviets do not eat, and Moscow has enriched us with an encyclopedic view of Russian coiffures of the 17th Century. We have given them the rules of the National Football League and they have regaled us with tales from the steppes.

Over the years, the two sides have traded quotations from Robert Frost and Ivan Turgenev, as well as homilies and data about tsetse flies, the Pharaohs of Egypt, medieval tilting, the uses of color, aging, cooking, state and provincial capitals and superstitions relevant to spilling salt, sneezing and other calamities. Many of these gems have been repeated many times before they were retired.

The hot line is not what many people think it is: a wire connecting two red telephones in the White House and the Kremlin. Although it is a direct and private link between leaders, it is designed to exchange printed, not spoken, messages. It involves two satellite systems backed up by land lines and cables, but no direct telephones.

In setting up the system 22 years ago, both governments agreed that it would be less than prudent if the leaders actually talked to each other in time of crisis. Conversational translation risks error, and a man’s voice, it was thought, could be too easily misinterpreted. A passing tone of anger or impatience might seem a threat. A case of heartburn might sound warlike. Printed exchanges, they agreed, would permit more time to think and consult for a more reasoned response.

Although it is tested 24 times a day, every day, the hot line actually has been used sparingly in its 22 years. Official secrecy cloaks the full count, but several former Presidents have revealed four gathering crises in which it was used to brake the wild spin of events.

“Mr. President, the hot line is up.”

Lyndon B. Johnson was the first President to hear that, and he heard it in his White House bedroom early on June 5, 1967, the start of the Six-Day War. Premier Alexei N. Kosygin was on the line.

Israel had attacked and destroyed the air force of Egypt, then a Soviet client state. Had the United States taken part in the attack, the man in the Kremlin demanded to know. From his ominous tone, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara thought he was saying, in effect, “If you want war, you’ll get war.”

Johnson told Kosygin the United States was not involved and was, in fact, pressing for a cease-fire. That seemed to be that. For the moment.

Three days later, both American and Soviet fleets were operating in the eastern Mediterranean, each watching the other closely lest one join the war. Suddenly, a U.S. communications ship, the Liberty, was heavily attacked.

“For 70 tense minutes, we had no idea who was responsible,” Johnson said later. McNamara suspected the Soviets.

Johnson ordered carrier planes to investigate and so informed Kosygin on the hot line, making clear the United States was not intervening in the war. An hour later, the Israelis admitted that they had hit the Liberty, saying it was an error. That, too, was passed quickly to Moscow on the hot line.

Another flash point had been contained. But the danger of sparks persisted as the two nuclear giants circled each other in a fire dance around the war of two small allies.

Two days later, Johnson was told: “Mr. Kosygin wants the President to come to the equipment as soon as possible.” Johnson hurried to the Situation Room of the White House. Kosygin came on the hot line with another dark message.

This time he was worried about Syria, which the Soviets had been supporting with arms and advisers. He warned that an Israeli attack on Damascus could produce a “grave catastrophe.” He implied that the Soviet Union would move in if Israel did not halt operations soon.

Johnson ordered the 6th Fleet closer to Syria, a move calculated to cool the Soviets. On the hot line, he told Kosygin that Israel, pressed by the United States, was close to a cease-fire with Syria. With one hand, the man from Texas seemed to counsel patience; with the other, he reached for his gun. Finally, the fighting ended and the two superpowers leaned back from the edge.

In 1971, it was the India-Pakistan war that brought a revealing exchange of private messages between Richard M. Nixon and Leonid I. Brezhnev. The Soviets supported India; the U.S. “tilted” toward Pakistan. A collision loomed.

However, the hot line and personal letters made candor possible, and a collision was avoided. Nixon, for example, was able to say privately what he could not say publicly. The leaders of the two nuclear superpowers, he said, “must not allow our larger interests to become embroiled in the actions of our smaller friends.”

In 1973, it was the Mideast again.

“Esteemed Mr. President.”

On that peaceful note, Brezhnev began his hot line message to Nixon at the close of that year’s war. But the tone quickly changed to words Nixon thought “hard and cold.”

Brezhnev was protesting Israeli violations of a cease-fire and implied “curtly” that the United States might have colluded in the violations. Nixon denied it and urged Brezhnev to support the cease-fire, which eventually held.

In 1979, Jimmy Carter took a turn. He used the hot line to warn Brezhnev that the Soviet leader would “jeopardize” U.S.-Soviet relations “throughout the world” unless he pulled back from Afghanistan. Brezhev said Soviet troops would be withdrawn as soon as they were no longer “needed”--an idea whose time has not yet come, six years later.

Like his predecessors, Ronald Reagan may not reveal his use of the private line to the Kremlin until he writes his memoirs. His White House will not discuss it but, according to one unconfirmed report, the Soviets activated it in 1983 to urge the United States to confine its retaliatory air attacks in Lebanon to Lebanon; Soviet “advisers” were manning Syrian positions just across the border.

The hot line symbolizes a different world. Off stage, public threat yields to private caution. Here, leaders use only half of President Theodore Roosevelt’s injunction about the conduct of foreign affairs: They speak softly but carry a small stick. They bargain on tip-toe.

It was that way in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which begat the hot line. John F. Kennedy wanted those Soviet missiles out of Cuba. In return, Nikita Khrushchev wanted Kennedy to pledge that he would not invade Cuba. Agreed. Khrushchev then upped the ante. He wanted U.S. missiles out of Turkey.

Those missiles were obsolete and were destined to be removed anyway. Kennedy told Khrushchev they would be out in a few months but not as a quid pro quo. Khrushchev was not to make this public. Agreed.

This took 13 tense days of point and counterpoint. Meanwhile, Kennedy ordered a blockade to stop more Soviet missiles from reaching Cuba. Everywhere else in the world he sought to avoid incidents.

He ordered all routine military flights near the Soviet Union canceled, but one American reconnaissance plane strayed over Siberia. Somehow no sparks flew. Said a shaken Kennedy later: “There’s always some son-of-a-bitch who doesn’t get the word.”

Crisis control is, at best, difficult, but Kennedy and Khrushchev also had a problem of communication. They had no direct private connection. Normal diplomatic channels were too slow and too official. So they used intermediaries, who met secretly, sometimes at midnight in a bar or restaurant.

Both sides agreed that this primitive, Grade-B movie method would not do for the leaders of the most powerful nations on Earth. On Aug. 30, 1963, they put the hot line in operation.

In its original form, the hot line was two Teletype machines in Washington and Moscow connected by telegraph lines and cables through Helsinki and backed up by a radio circuit with a relay in Tangiers. Despite its awesome mission, it could not escape Murphy’s law. The main line was cut twice, by a farmer plowing a field in Finland and by a manhole fire near Baltimore.

Satellite Communications

In 1978, the introduction of satellite communications made the system less vulnerable to accident or sabotage. Since then, the hot line has consisted of two satellite circuits and the original system, all used in the same tests and messages between leaders. The chances of all three failing at the same time are tiny.

It works this way: A message from the President goes from the White House by special electronic transmission, secure phone or by hand to a long, narrow room at the hushed and mysterious National Military Command Center in the Pentagon.

There, the officer in charge immediately orders the door locked and phones the White House to validate the message. Validated, it is then punched into a small brown machine, which simultaneously encodes it.

It is then transmitted to two Earth stations in Maryland and West Virginia and from there up to an American and Soviet satellite high above the Equator, down to two Soviet Earth stations in Moscow and Lvov and finally to the Kremlin. There, a tape supplied by the Pentagon is run through a machine to decode the incoming message from the President.

No Cost Estimate

In their turn, the Soviets reverse the process to transmit to Washington. No computer has figured out what 10 words or less cost on the hot line.

The little brown machines that encode and decode are the same in Washington and Moscow. They were made in West Germany. Neither side volunteered such a machine produced in its own country for fear that the other would learn more about its technology than it wanted to share with an adversary.

The newest improvement in the hot line, scheduled to begin later in the fall, is the use of facsimile transmission. This is expected to triple the speed of messages and make possible the exchange of pictures, maps and charts should one side want to warn the other of an errant plane or submarine.

The new system requires several machines that the United States agreed to sell to the Soviets. (They were commercially available, anyway.)

In all, the agreement for the changes took more than a year. A State Department source said U.S. negotiators frequently had to check back with their security experts about Soviet proposals; the Russians were asking for more high technology than they needed for the hot line.

Split-Level Cold War

Thus, the strange, split-level Cold War goes on. Each side threatens and distrusts the other, but each seeks some kind of reassurance from the other.

Every day they aim their nuclear missiles and their nuclear submarines at each other, and every day their planes stalk each others’ borders. The dangers of explosion are beyond number, but they look for fuses to defuse. The hot line is one way.

In recent years, there has been a growing momentum in Congress and the Reagan Administration to find more ways to contain crises. Various things have been suggested, but the broadest idea comes from William Ury of Harvard, author of “Beyond the Hot Line.”

Ury proposes permanent, connected “crisis control centers” in Washington and Moscow, staffed by military and diplomatic officials of both countries, to monitor, consult and act to prevent war by accident.

Can the Soviets be trusted in such matters?

“To work together in these areas,” said Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), “does not require an assumption that the Soviet leaders are honest and trustworthy--only an assumption that they are sane.”