Contrary to what one might think, the red telephone, immortalized in this way, was not a telephone, but a telegraph, and it is doubtful that it was red.
But color, a symbol of emergency in the midst of the Cold War, contributed to making history the first channel of communication between the offices of John Kennedy and that of Nikita Khrushchev. Relations between the presidents of the United States and the Soviet Union were tense, and this direct connection at least allowed for dialogue between the two.
Sixty years later, it is in the Ukraine that tensions between the United States and Russia are rising again. Tiago Moreira de Sá, a researcher at the Portuguese Institute of International Relations, does not believe that there is currently a direct line between the two countries: “Any international, regional or European order implies that Russia is part of it, but since the beginning of “After the war in Ukraine, Russian tanks and artillery completely destroyed that hypothesis. I’m not saying there can’t be dialogue, there always will be in the future, but all channels of dialogue have been destroyed at the initiative of Russia.”
But in the days of the Cold War, the construction of a “permanent” communication channel managed to avoid the worst: a nuclear war. “The idea was to avoid a new missile crisis in Cuba, new dangers in the world, enter into a nuclear apocalypse and reduce the underlying tension a bit,” adds the professor of international relations at the NOVA University of Lisbon, in statements to TSF.
Kennedy and Khrushchev would have spoken several times through this hotline, which started other conversations, especially between “the information and defense services, and the military leaders”, that is, the hotline opened space for other dialogues between the United States and the then Soviet. Union.
This new equipment was financed in equal parts by both countries, sharing the maintenance costs equally, but it is still difficult to define whether it was the Americans or the Soviets who took the initiative. Tiago Moreira de Sá affirms that this happens because “the primary sources that are declassified are mainly those of the United States and the existing literature is overwhelmingly North American”.
“It is very clear that from the beginning the Kennedy administration, which has to manage the Cuban missile crisis, but then all the subsequent ones, Johnson, Nixon, Carter and Reagan, all realized that the relationship between the superpowers presupposed the dialogue between the parties. It was essential that they speak permanently,” he adds.
These talks no longer exist between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin because, in the opinion of Tiago Moreira de Sá, “there are no conditions for it”: “It is difficult to talk about dialogue since the start of the war in Ukraine because any “opening is understood from the Russian side as a sign of weakness. If there is one thing that is clear to everyone, it is that Putin only understands and respects force.”
But in the long term, the university researcher believes that the situation could change: “There has to come a time when that red telephone returns and the parties can return to dialogue. If anything is known, it is that all durable solutions are political and there are to talk about them.”
For now, there are no conditions for this scenario, which do not allow turning on a phone that prevented nuclear war.
Source: TSF
