The Red Telephone: A Hybrid Object of the Cold War

Abstract

One wrong word, a moment of inattention or a technical malfunction could have unthinkable consequences. At stake is nothing less than the complete devastation of the Soviet Union and the United States. The interpreter-translator and first-person narrator of the short story “Abraham ’59 – A Nuclear Fantasy” (Aiken 1959: 18–24) is sitting with the American President in a room in the basement of the White House and has just been informed of a dramatic situation. A bomber squadron of the US Air Force has not returned from a routine flight and – now beyond the reach of American fighter-interceptors –, acting on its own authority, has announced a nuclear attack on Moscow in order to force the US leadership to go to war against the Soviet Union. But the President has no intention of giving in to the extortion. He wants to contact Nikita Khrushchev “via transatlantic telephone” (Aiken 1959: 23) and, if the Soviet defense cannot stop the attack, offer New York as a compensatory sacrifice, in accordance with the biblical formula, “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” The American ambassador in Moscow and the Soviet ambassador to the UN in New York have now been brought into a conference call on the red telephone. According to the plan, if the connection to Moscow is severed by the detonation of the atomic bombs, the President would then order the bombing of New York, which in turn could be verified by the disruption of the telephone connection. The destruction of their own city would provide credible proof that the US attack on Moscow was an accident, instigated by pilots who are clearly mentally disturbed, from whom one would have in fact expected “fanatic devotion to their superiors” (Aiken 1959: 20). The situation facing the American Commander-in-Chief can be described using ideas from game-theory dating from that period, which were further developed by specific think tanks in order to be applied to crisis situations in the Cold War. The narrator of the short story refers in his recollections to the “new-model theorists of Cold War” (Aiken 1959: 18), who had developed a series of formulas