1963 It was the Cuban missile crisis that prompted the direct line between the two capitals. President Kennedy had demanded that the Russians remove their missiles from Cuba. The world waited, on the brink of the Third World War. Then at 6.00pm on 26 October 1962, the White House received a message from Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, offering to remove the missiles if the Americans would undertake not to attack Cuba.
It took the Americans twelve hours to decode this crucial communiqué. Thinking the US was stalling, Khrushchev sent another message at 11.00 the next morning. This time the conditions were more stringent: the US to remove all its Jupiter missiles from Turkey and Italy first. Then Kennedy’s advisors had a brilliant idea. Why not accept the conditions in Khrushchev’s first message and ignore his second? It worked, but it was a close run thing.
So on 20 July the two countries set up a hotline between the capitals. In just a month it went into action. Phase one was just a duplex telegraph line, on the assumption that voice transmission would require simultaneous translation both ways, and lead to confusion – not to mention comic possibilities of the sort exploited in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove a year later.
Here’s the scenario. Air Force General Jack D. Ripper, convinced that the Soviet Union has been polluting the ‘bodily fluids’ of the American people, has launched a nuclear strike on Russia. In the war room the American president, played by Peter Sellers to look and sound as much like Adlai Stevenson as possible, is calling Soviet premier Dmitri Kissov on the hotline:
Hello? … Uh … Hello D– uh, hello Dmitri? Listen uh uh I can’t hear too well. Do you suppose you could turn the music down just a little? … Oh-ho, that’s much better … Now then, Dmitri, you know how we’ve always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb … The Bomb, Dmitri … The hydrogen bomb! … Well now, what happened is … ahm … one of our base commanders, he had a sort of … well, he went a little funny in the head … you know … just a little … funny. And, ah … he went and did a silly thing … Well, I’ll tell you what he did. He ordered his planes … to attack your country … Ah … Well, let me finish, Dmitri … Let me finish, Dmitri … Well listen, how do you think I feel about it? … Can you imagine how I feel about it, Dmitri? … Why do you think I’m calling you? Just to say hello? … Yes! I mean i-i-i-if we’re unable to recall the planes, then … I’d say that, ah … well, ah … we’re just gonna have to help you destroy them, Dmitri … All right, well listen now. Who should we call? … Who should we call, Dmitri? The … wha-whe, the People … you, sorry, you faded away there … The People’s Central Air Defence Headquarters … Where is that, Dmitri? … In Omsk … Right … Listen, do you happen to have the phone number on you, Dmitri? … Whe-ah, what? I see, just ask for Omsk information.
Sellers ad-libbed much of this himself (it was later retro-scripted to become part of the film’s official transcript). Four takes were spoiled because the actors around the war room table couldn’t stop laughing.