CODE · Crisis Communication and Deterrence: The Interaction of Facts and Fictions

Crisis Communication and Deterrence: The Interaction of Facts and Fictions

This MSCA research project “Crisis Communication and Deterrence: The Interaction of Facts and Fictions” examines crisis communication during the Cold War from a media historical perspective. The project aims to comprehensively explore the fictitious Red Telephone, which supposedly connected Washington’s White House to Moscow’s Kremlin during the Cold War. An integral part of this genealogy is the history of the existing hotline, a teletype connection, that both ‘superpowers’ established as a result of their experiences during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The goal of the project is to write the unwritten and interwoven history of the hotline and the Red Telephone within the framework of an imaginary history of the Cold War. Analyzing the factual and fictitious channels of communication together aims to characterize the Cold War as a conflict that was not only determined by actual events and political concepts, but also by fictions of nuclear war. Based on this, the researcher focuses on the resonances between factual and fictitious Cold War events against the backdrop of deterrence policy. Thus the project contributes to the media cultures and imaginary history of the Cold War and the subsequent phase of political transformation. The overarching purpose is to better understand the agency of media in constructing fictitious crises and escalating and deescalating factual crises. This aligns closely with the question of how authorized and sovereign actions are delegated to technical media during time-critical crisis situations. The project examines fictitious and factual crisis communication during the Cold War and the fear triggered by weapon systems and deterrence, until the ‘War on Terror’ caused a new kind of fear. The fiction of the Red Telephone condenses political and ethical questions that the secret diplomacy of the hotline is unable to address. Therefore, it constitutes the reality of life, which is updated through societal self-descriptions. The investigation period covers the initial means of transatlantic crisis communication during World War II; the concepts of Cold War deterrence; and the discussions on crisis communication in the 1950s. It also covers the rupture in 1989/90 up to the proposed end of the Red Telephone in 2008, triggered by a Hillary Clinton commercial. Although the historical investigation progresses largely chronologically, it follows a media-technological logic, which shifts from (purportedly) two communication partners, the USA and the USSR, to a network, through the integration of third parties. Initially, it investigates how the hotline and the Red Telephone contributed to the formation of the Cold War bipolarity against the backdrop of the policy of deterrence. In a further step, the project explores the ways in which third parties disturbed the bipolar USA-USSR crisis communication, until eventually, network-shaped communication prevailed after the end of the Cold War.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union