While such levels of personal engagement are quite rare, threats posed by sophisticated hacking, spoofing, or even simple voice imitation could even deceive leaders who have a high level of familiarity with one another. While there is no leader-level hotline between the two nuclear neighbors, since Narendra Modi became the Indian prime minister in 2014 and until the crisis began last summer he and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in person at least 18 times. Both were created in the wake of the 2020 border crisis between India and China.
The Indian and Chinese foreign ministers also agreed to a political hotline in February of this year. When it comes to India and China, a hotline between the Indian Director General of Military Operations and the Chinese Western Theater Command was set up only in 2020 after years of protracted discussions. On the political side, the 1989 hotline between Indian and Pakistani Prime Ministers Rajiv Gandhi and Benazir Bhutto, which has been turned on and off multiple times ever since, and the 2004 nuclear hotline between the Indian and Pakistani foreign ministers are assumed by experts to be moribund. The problem with this hotline is that, while it has been tailored to help de-escalate tensions related to the Line of Control, the issues between India and Pakistan are much more substantial. In February 2021, it was resurrected after a number of years to discuss and agree to the current cease-fire between the two countries. The military-operated India-Pakistan hotline established after the 1971 war was seen for decades as “noisy and unreliable with frequent breakdowns” and thus has not always been used when one would expect. It is unclear if the military and political bilateral links in this area are reliable or have even been used consistently in real crises. In South Asia, where tensions remain high among India, Pakistan, and China over border disputes, there are no hotlines between the heads of states of any of these three countries and only limited bilateral ones at other levels of seniority between India and Pakistan, and, very recently, India and China. After all, trust is the issue: trust in the identity of the interlocutor trust in the system itself, including its robustness under the most extreme conditions and trust in the messages it carries. Astonishingly, in an age when any nuclear crisis or conflict could not be contained with certainty to two states, there are currently no multilateral communication lines that can be trusted. However, even if bilateral hotlines existed for all nuclear-armed states, they would no longer meet the needs of a multipolar nuclear world.ĭespite the nearly one dozen hotline links that now exist, not all countries with nuclear weapons are linked up at the level of heads of state or, in some cases, at any level. Over the last 50 years, other bilateral hotlines have been put in place around the world, all varying in form, function, and level of seniority. What started in 1963 as written messages bounced between Washington and Moscow on trans-Atlantic cables across various nodes in Europe was then upgraded from radio to satellite circuits in 1978, to a high-speed fax service in 1986, and then to fiber-optic-based communications in 2008. Although the U.S.-Soviet hotline was popularly referred to as the “red telephone,” this is misleading. The resulting Washington-Moscow hotline has served as a model for other bilateral communication links for more than half a century. The thin silver lining of the crisis was an increased understanding for both superpowers, as well as the rest of the world, of the need for swift and trusted leadership-level communications. The delays added to the mistrust, and the world came within a hair’s breadth of a devastating nuclear exchange.
It took up to half a day for messages to travel between respective embassies in the deeply distrustful capitals. and Soviet leaders to communicate personally, unambiguously, and with certainty in real time contributed to the misinterpretations and miscalculations that drove the superpowers to the brink of nuclear war. Next year will mark the 60th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis.
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