The Moscow–Washington hotline, in Russian, Горячая линия Вашингтон -Москва, is a system that allows direct communication between the leaders of the United States and the Russian Federation. This hotline was established in 1963 and links the Pentagon with the Kremlin, historically, with Soviet Communist Party leadership across the square from the Kremlin itself. Although in popular culture known as the red telephone, the hotline was never a telephone line, and no red phones were used. The first implementation used Teletype equipment, and shifted to fax machines in 1986.
Since 2008, the Moscow–Washington hotline is a secure computer link over which messages are exchanged by email.
Several people came up with the idea for a hotline. They included Harvard professor Thomas Schelling, who had worked on nuclear war policy for the Defense Department previously. Schelling credited the pop fiction novel Red Alert, the basis of the film Dr. Strangelove, with making governments more aware of the benefit of direct communication between the superpowers.
The Moscow–Washington hotline
In addition, Parade magazine editor Jess Gorkin personally badgered 1960 presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, and buttonholed the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during a U.S. visit to adopt the idea.
During this period Gerard C. Smith, as head of the State Department Policy Planning Staff, proposed direct communication links between Moscow and Washington. Objections from others in the State Department, the U.S. military, and the Kremlin delayed introduction.
The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis made the hotline a priority. During the standoff, official diplomatic messages typically took six hours to deliver; unofficial channels, such as via television network correspondents, had to be used too as they were quicker.
The Moscow–Washington hotline
During the crisis, the United States took nearly twelve hours to receive and decode Nikita Khrushchev's 3,000-word initial settlement message, a dangerously long time. By the time Washington had drafted a reply, a tougher message from Moscow had been received, demanding that U.S. missiles be removed from Turkey. White House advisers thought faster communications could have averted the crisis, and resolved it quicker. The two countries signed the Hot Line Agreement in June 1963, the first time they formally took action to cut the risk of starting a nuclear war unintentionally.
The first message transmitted over the hotline was on August 30, 1963. Washington sent Moscow the text: The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back 1234567890. This included all the Latin alphabet, as well as all Arabic numerals and the apostrophe, to test that the keyboard and printer were working correctly.
Today's difference between Russia and the United States is that in Russia everybody takes everybody else for a spy, and in the United States everybody takes everybody else for a criminal.
Apollo 11 was the spaceflight that landed the first two humans on the Moon. Mission commander Neil Armstrong and pilot Buzz Aldrin, both American, landed the lunar module Eagle on July 20, 1969, at 20:18 UTC.
Armstrong became the first to step onto the lunar surface six hours later on July 21 at 02:56:15 UTC; Aldrin joined him about 20 minutes later. They spent about two and a quarter hours together outside the spacecraft, and collected 21.5 kg of lunar material to bring back to Earth. Michael Collins piloted the command module Columbia alone in lunar orbit while they were on the Moon's surface. Armstrong and Aldrin spent just under a day on the lunar surface before rendezvousing with Columbia in lunar orbit.
Apollo 11 was launched by a Saturn V rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Florida, on July 16, and was the fifth manned mission of NASA's Apollo program. The Apollo spacecraft had three parts: a command module with a cabin for the three astronauts, and the only part that landed back on Earth; a service module, which supported the command module with propulsion, electrical power, oxygen, and water; and a lunar module that had two stages, a lower stage for landing on the Moon, and an upper stage to place the astronauts back into lunar orbit.
After being sent toward the Moon by the Saturn V's upper stage, the astronauts separated the spacecraft from it and traveled for three days until they entered into lunar orbit. Armstrong and Aldrin then moved into the lunar module Eagle and landed in the Sea of Tranquility.
They stayed a total of about 21.5 hours on the lunar surface. The astronauts used Eagle's upper stage to lift off from the lunar surface and rejoin Collins in the command module.
They jettisoned Eagle before they performed the maneuvers that blasted them out of lunar orbit on a trajectory back to Earth. They returned to Earth and landed in the Pacific Ocean on July 24.
Broadcast on live TV to a worldwide audience, Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface and described the event as one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind. Apollo 11 effectively ended the Space Race and fulfilled a national goal proposed in 1961 by U.S. President John F. Kennedy: before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.
Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon.
Berliner Mauer, The Berlin Wall, in an old picture
Today, The Bonds are going to visit The Berliner Mauer aka The Berlin Wall and the East Side Gallery. It will be an exciting visit full of feeling and emotions because this wall has determined the lives of millions of people and when it fell the Cold War gave another step to the end. The Wall wasn't only a construction of bricks but the line that separate two manners of understanding economy,commerce and free expression. Firstly, this German fact changed the recent history of many countries like Romania, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Belorussia, Ukraine, Moldavia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia or Bulgaria and prepared another one in Yugoslavia (Balkan War), Albania, China or Cuba.
Berliner Mauer or The Berlin Wall was a barrier that divided Berlin from 1961 to 1989.
Constructed by the GermanDemocratic Republic, GDR, East Germany, starting on 13 August 1961, the Wall completely cut off by land West Berlin from surrounding East Germany and from East Berlin until government officials opened it in November 1989.
Its demolition officially began on 13 June 1990 and was completed in 1992. The barrier included guard towers placed along large concrete walls, which circumscribed a wide area, later known as the death strip, that contained anti-vehicle trenches, fakir beds and other defenses.
The Eastern Bloc claimed that the Wall was erected to protect its population from fascist elements conspiring to prevent the will of the people in building a socialist state in East Germany. In practice, the Wall served to prevent the massive emigration and defection that had marked East Germany and the communist Eastern Bloc during the post-World War II period.
Some children playing next to the Berlin Wall
After the end of World War II in Europe, what remained of pre-war Germany west of the Oder-Neisse line was divided into four occupation zones, as per the Potsdam Agreement, each one controlled by one of the four occupying Allied powers: the United States, United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union. The capital of Berlin, as the seat of the Allied Control Council, was similarly subdivided into four sectors despite the city's location, which was fully within the Soviet zone.
Within two years, political divisions increased between the Soviets and the other occupying powers. These included the Soviets' refusal to agree to reconstruction plans making post-war Germany self-sufficient and to a detailed accounting of the industrial plants, goods and infrastructure already removed by the Soviets. Britain, France, the United States and the Benelux countries later met to combine the non-Soviet zones of the country into one zone for reconstruction and to approve the extension of the Marshall Plan.
On 15 June 1961, First Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party and GDR State Council chairman Walter Ulbricht stated in an international press conference, Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten!, No one has the intention of erecting a wall!. It was the first time the colloquial term Mauer, wall, had been used in this context.
The transcript of a telephone call between Nikita Khrushchev and Ulbricht on 1 August in the same year, suggests that the initiative for the construction of the Wall came from Khrushchev.
However, other sources suggest that Khrushchev had initially been wary about building a wall, fearing negative Western reaction. What is beyond dispute, though, is that Ulbricht had pushed for a border closure for quite some time, arguing that East Germany's very existence was at stake.
Khrushchev had been emboldened by US President John F. Kennedy's tacit indication that the US would not actively oppose this action in the Soviet sector of Berlin.
On Saturday, 12 August 1961, the leaders of the GDR attended a garden party at a government guesthouse in Döllnsee, in a wooded area to the north of East Berlin. There Ulbricht signed the order to close the border and erect a wall.
The line of the Berlin Wall nowadays
Hungary effectively disabled its physical border defenses with Austria on 19 August 1989 and, in September, more than 13,000 East German tourists escaped through Hungary to Austria. This set up a chain of events.
This was followed by mass demonstrations within East Germany itself. Protest demonstrations spread throughout East Germany in September 1989. This was the start of what East Germans generally call the Peaceful Revolution of late 1989. The protest demonstrations grew considerably by early November.
The movement neared its height on 4 November, when half a million people gathered to demand political change, at the Alexanderplatz demonstration, East Berlin's large public square and transportation The fall of the Berlin Wall began the evening of 9 November 1989 and continued over the following days and weeks, with people nicknamed Mauerspechte, wall woodpeckers, using various tools to chip off souvenirs, demolishing lengthy parts in the process, and creating several unofficial border crossings.
Television coverage of citizens demolishing sections of the Wall on 9 November was soon followed by the East German regime announcing ten new border crossings, including the historically significant locations of Potsdamer Platz, Glienicker Brücke, and Bernauer Straße. Crowds gathered on both sides of the historic crossings waiting for hours to cheer the bulldozers that tore down portions of the Wall to reinstate ancient roads. While the Wall officially remained guarded at a decreasing intensity, new border crossings continued for some time, including the Brandenburg Gate on 22 December 1989.
The Bonds visiting East Side Gallery
In some European capitals at the time, there was a deep anxiety over prospects for a reunified Germany. In September 1989, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher pleaded with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev not to let the Berlin Wall fall and confided that she wanted the Soviet leader to do what he could to stop it.
We do not want a united Germany. This would lead to a change to postwar borders and we cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security, Thatcher told Gorbachev.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, French President François Mitterrand warned Thatcher that a unified Germany could make more ground than Adolf Hitler ever had and that Europe would have to bear the consequences.
Nowadays, Berlin is a symbol of peace and reconciliation, a modern city, capital of one of the more powerful European countries. The East Side Gallery is an international memorial for freedom. It is a 1316 m long section of the Berlin Wall located near the centre of Berlin on Mühlenstraße in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. The actual border at this point was the river Spree. The gallery is located on the so-called hinterland mauer, which closed the border to West Berlin.
The Berlin Wall wasn't the only barrier to fall after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Traditional barriers to the flow of money, trade, people and ideas also fell.
The Cuban Missile Crisiswas a 13-day (October 16–28, 1962) confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union concerning Soviet ballistic missile deployment in Cuba.It was the closest the Cold War came to escalating into a full-scale nuclear war.
In response to the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion of 1961, and the presence of American Jupiter ballistic missiles in Italy and Turkey, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev decided to agree to Cuba's request to place nuclear missiles in Cuba to deter future harassment of Cuba. An agreement was reached during a secret meeting between Khrushchev and Fidel Castro in July 1962 and construction of a number of missile launch facilities started later that summer.
Washington-Moscow hotline
The 1962 midterm elections were under way in the United States and the White House had denied charges that it was ignoring dangerous Soviet missiles 90 miles from Florida.
These missile preparations were confirmed when an Air Force U-2 spy plane produced clear photographic evidence of medium-range (SS-4) and intermediate-range (R-14) ballistic missile facilities on October 14.
The United States established a military blockade to prevent further missiles from entering Cuba. It announced that they would not permit offensive weapons to be delivered to Cuba and demanded that the weapons already in Cuba be dismantled and returned to the USSR.
After a long period of tense negotiations, an agreement was reached between President John F. Kennedy and Khrushchev. Publicly, the Soviets would dismantle their offensive weapons in Cuba and return them to the Soviet Union, subject to United Nations verification, in exchange for a U.S. public declaration and agreement never to invade Cuba again without direct provocation. Secretly, the United States also agreed that it would dismantle all U.S. -built Jupiter MRBMs, which were deployed in Turkey and Italy against the Soviet Union butwere not known to the public.
Spy photo. San Cristóbal, Cuba. 14 October 1962
When all offensive missiles and Ilyushin Il-28 light bombers had been withdrawn from Cuba, the blockade was formally ended on November 20, 1962.The negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union pointed out the necessity of a quick, clear, and direct communication line between Washington and Moscow.
As a result, the Moscow Washington hotline was established. A seriesof agreements sharply reduced U.S.-Soviet tensions during the following years.
The United States was concerned about an expansion of Communism, and a Latin American country allying openly with the USSR was regarded as unacceptable, given the U.S.–Soviet enmity since the end of World War II. Such an involvement would also directly defy the Monroe Doctrine, a U.S. policy which, while limiting the United States' involvement in European colonies and European affairs, held that European powers ought not to have involvement with states in the Western Hemisphere.
