Cuba, Khrushchev & Kennedy

August 30: The Moscow–Washington “Hot Line” was established on this day in 1963. A Cold War icon, the Hot Line was the direct result of the Cuban Missile Crisis, during which exchanges between the Kremlin and the White House sometimes took dangerously long to send and decode. If the world was almost blown up by slow messaging, it may have been saved by having superpower leaders as “sane and level-headed” as JFK and Khrushchev.