Hot Line: Ready Made for Arms Talks

The Washington-Moscow hot line, a Cold War tool set up in the 1960s to prevent an accidental war, will more likely be used in the 1990s for disarmament talks, the Army said Monday.

Contrary to popular belief, the hot line is not a pair of red phones, one in the Oval Office, the other in the Kremlin. It’s a complex web of technology enabling the heads of state in both countries to exchange written messages directly, by Teletype and fax.

“I suspect the future of this facility will be focused more on the remaining nuclear force reduction efforts, verification and other issues that I suspect only our imaginations can address,” said Lt. Gen. Jerome B. Hilmes, director of information systems for the Secretary of the Army.

The hot line is maintained at Ft. Detrick, about 50 miles northwest of Washington.

Hilmes was at the base to announce completion of a $4.7-million renovation of the emergency communications link. The improvements included new transmitters and receivers, control consoles and a new pair of 60-foot satellite dishes.

The hot line was established in 1963, 11 months after tensions rose between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cuban missile crisis. In that verbal altercation, President John F. Kennedy forced the Soviets to dismantle their missile bases in Cuba.

The hot line has been used more than 15 times since then.

One of the most notable uses was during the six-day Arab-Israeli war in 1967. President Lyndon B. Johnson advised the Soviet Union of U.S. ship and aircraft movements in the Mediterranean Sea after an Israeli attack on the Liberty.

Though seldom used for its intended purpose, the line is tested several times a day by technicians at both ends to ensure it works.

As the cold war ebbs, routine, maintenance-related dispatches on the presidential hot line are becoming more informal, said Tom Brothers, manager of the Ft. Detrick earth station.

American technicians and linguists have detected a freer flow of words in messages they exchange hourly with their Soviet counterparts.

“Could we ask an unofficial question about basketball?” Brothers said the Soviets asked last February. “Could you please tell us how our Kurtinaitis performed against your snipers?”--an apparent translation of long-range basketball shooters.

The Soviets were referring to Rimas Kurtinaitis, a 6-foot-5 basketball star from Lithuania. The NBA had invited Kurtinaitis to challenge eight of the NBA’s best long-distance shooters in a 3-point contest in Houston.

“We’d like to know how he feels in the NBA,” the Soviets said, according to Brothers.

He said the U.S. hot line workers replied, “Friends, in the local newspaper it says that Kurtinaitis is feeling fine, but there are no results from the competition. They’ll probably be in tomorrow’s paper.”

Such informality was unknown several years ago, Brothers said.

The first hot line, a transatlantic Teletype cable, was prone to interruptions. A Finnish farmer cut a hot line cable with his plow in 1963. In the 1970s, a manhole fire north of Baltimore severed the cable’s primary circuit. About the same time, American telephone workers accidentally cut the cables to the hot line.

Today, each hot-line message goes to the Soviet Union three ways--by land cable and two satellite systems. The duplication is necessary to ensure that messages get through during a crisis, Brothers said.

Any message Bush might send to Gorbachev is encoded and taken to a terminal in Washington.