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From personal observation, there are quite a few color-coded military telephone. Red was most associated with the SAC primary alerting system, which was operational, not at the Presidential level. NORAD's warning telephone for the President and others were gold.
From the context of the text this reference appears to be an example of a campaign advert by Senator Clinton in which she references the 'Red Telephone'. This is only partially correct. The majority of the video is a highly partisan commentary on Senator Clinton's candidacy for president. In my opinion this is quite detrimental to the article as a whole.
Sorry if I've put this in the wrong place or in the wrong way, but I'm a bear of very little brain, and complicated editing protocols bother me. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.45.76.114 (talk) 19:15, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The article is all but well researched. The red phone has NOTING to do with the Washington-Moscow hotline. In fact, the writers of wiki article completely misunderstand the concept of RED phone. I am tired of correcting people's mistakes on this and many other "previously classified" stuff. It would be nice if one of you did a good research en got rid of the nonsens in this article.
In some way, I understand the mistakes, as even many politicians (who also don't know a zip about cryptography, the military or communications security) also made these mistakes about the hotline and red phones, fed by hollywood to the gullible movie viewers. Nevertheless, it's not an excuse for publishing errors in Wikipedia. Who says it's a red phone??? Who says a phone was added in 1971??? Ik know, even governments officials and journalists (and Hollywood) had it wrong, but such people are not really good sources, are they?. Check your sources first!
The red phone in the picture was most likely used as part of the Defense Red Switch Network, linking the president, the secretary of defense and all the mayor command centers. So not for international, but for internal use, that is the chain of command for the US defense system. P2Peter (talk) 01:08, 19 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I now did a major review of this article, correcting the mistake of the red telephone and adding some info about the newer technology which was/is used for the hotline. Also added some new weblinks and other sources. P2Peter (talk) 02:43, 16 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Lloyd Jeff Dumas apparently mentions in his book [1] that this line has malfunctioned several times. This would be interesting to add to the article, if documented. -- Beland (talk) 03:11, 20 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Comments by officials asking for new communication channels[edit]
I thought about adding this content:
In 2015 European Leadership Network (ELN) chair and former British defense minister Des Browne states that there's a "need to find a mechanism in which we can talk at the highest level". Brown, former Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov and former US Senator and veteran of international disarmament policy Sam Nunn jointly recommend "that reliable communication channels exist in the event of serious incidents". Head of NATO Allied Command Operations in Europe Philip Breedlove calls for a new "red telephone".[1]
However doesn't the hotline still exist? Are they speaking about an additional channel? If so, an EU-Russia / Brussels-Moscow hotline?