Re: Starting WWIII by mistake - is the Red Phone still sitting on the president'sdesk

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
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And is there another Red Phone for China? And should we get one for Iran?

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Could WWIII be started by a flock of geese showing up on radar?

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Why would you need more than one “red phone?”

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Because the first one was a direct always-open line to the red phone on Khrushchev’s desk.
It would hardly do to call him up to see if he could explain radar blips (or are those geese) coming from China.

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First, there’s a misconception to correct. There’s never been a “red telephone” sitting on the President’s desk that gives him a special voice line to the Kremlin. The hotline has always been a dedicated teletype line - now with satellite backup - connecting terminals in Moscow and Washington (now in the White House, but initially in the Pentagon).
No doubt if Bush wants to phone Putin then, in this day and age, their respective switchboards can rapidly set up a call so that they’re both talking on phones at their desks, but there’s no special system just for such calls between them. The teletype hotline, by contrast, can only be used for messages between them.

This paper (a pdf) goes into quite some detail about the history of the Moscow-Washington hotline, together with those case where the idea has been copied. There are, or have been, similar communication channels in use from Moscow to London, Bonn, Paris and Beijing.

The US and China agreed to establish a similar direct teletype link in April 1998.
One argument for not setting up such a link with Iran, aside from the fact that it shouldn’t be necessary in such a case regardless of how things develop, is that - as explained in the link - hotlines have come to be seen as largely a matter of mutual prestige by the countries setting them up.

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Thanks.
The concept (humorously stated, I’ll admit) for a line to Iran would be that if they announce they have created a warhead and we see geese headed from there to Tel Aviv, then a little man to man chat might avert another mid-east war. Of course, the line would be more efficient if it ran from Tehran to Tel Aviv, but that’s even less likely. Somehow, basing all retalitory decisions on geese blips is a bit frightening.