The Moscow–Washington hotline
The 'red telephone' was never a telephone
After the Cuban Missile Crisis the USSR and USA agreed on a direct link, which went live on 30 August 1963. Contrary to films it was no red phone but a teletype, later a fax. Washington's first message was the pangram about the quick brown fox and the lazy dog, to test every letter.
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The Moscow–Washington hotline was once cut by a Finnish farmer's plough and another time by a Danish bulldozer. And a Soviet diplomat asked the US Secretary of State what the first message, about a 'quick brown fox', meant. Share →
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 16 years earlier
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 15 years earlier
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 14 years earlier
- 1980 Smallpox declared eradicated — 17 years later
- 1981 AIDS first described — 18 years later
Europe
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 22 years earlier
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 10 years earlier
- 1957 Treaty of Rome — 6 years earlier
- 1961 Berlin Wall built — 2 years earlier
- 1968 May 1968 in France — 5 years later
Middle East
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 15 years earlier
- 1948–1949 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the Nakba — 15 years earlier
- 1953 Iranian coup against Mosaddegh — 10 years earlier
- 1978 Camp David Accords — 15 years later
- 1979 Iranian Revolution — 16 years later
Africa
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 5 years earlier
- 1960 Year of Africa — 3 years earlier
- 1963 The Organisation of African Unity is founded — same year
- 1967 First human heart transplant — 4 years later
- 1967–1970 Nigerian Civil War and Biafra — 4 years later
Asia
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 18 years earlier
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 10 years earlier
- 1964 First Shinkansen high-speed railway — 1 year later
- 1966–1976 Cultural Revolution in China — 3 years later
- 1975–1979 The Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide — 12 years later
Americas
- 1960 Great Chilean earthquake — 3 years earlier
- 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis — 1 year earlier
- 1969 Moon landing — 6 years later
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 7 years later
- 1983 Birth of the Internet: ARPANET adopts TCP/IP — 20 years later
Oceania
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 22 years earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 21 years earlier
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 9 years earlier
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 4 years earlier
Alive at the time
- Winston Churchill (aged 89)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 82)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 74)
- Mao Zedong (aged 70)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 45)
- Martin Luther King Jr. (aged 34)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 33)
- Yuri Gagarin (aged 29)
- Harry S. Truman (aged 79)
- Anna Akhmatova (aged 74)