Hotline

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In common or colloquial usage, a hotline refers to a line to get immediate assistance with a problem. For example, Howard Dean created a hotline for legislators in Vermont to provide feedback on budget cuts. Most commonly, a hotline refers to a mental health hotline. Depending on the community, there are hotlines for stress, child abuse, domestic abuse or other forms of self-harm or injurious conduct.

In telecommunication, a hotline (also called an automatic signaling service or off-hook service) is a point-to-point communications link in which a call is automatically originated to the preselected destination without any additional action by the user when the end instrument goes off-hook.

True hotlines cannot be used to originate calls other than to preselected destinations. Although it is technically inaccurate, call centers reachable by dialing a standard telephone number, or sometimes the phone numbers themselves, are also sometimes referred to as "hotlines." This is especially the case with 24-hour, noncommercial numbers, such as police tip hotlines or suicide crisis hotlines.

A famous hotline, the so-called "red telephone", linked the White House with the Kremlin during the Cold War. It was established in 1963 after the Cuban missile crisis made it clear that reliable, direct communications between the two great nuclear powers was a vital necessity. During the crisis, it took nearly 12 hours to receive and decode Nikita Khruschev's 3,000 word initial settlement message—a dangerously long time in the chronology of nuclear brinkmanship. By the time the U.S. had drafted a reply, a tougher message from Moscow had been received demanding that U.S. missiles be removed from Turkey; White House advisors at the time thought that the crisis could have been more quickly, and more easily, averted if communication had been faster. This link was encrypted using the theoretically unbreakable one-time pad system<ref>David Kahn, The Codebreakers, pp. 715–716</ref>. Initially the red phone was not actually a telephone, but a set of high-speed teleprinters, based on the idea that spontaneous verbal communications could lead to miscommunications and misperceptions. By the mid-1970s, the hotline featured an actual telephone. The hotline was used for the first time during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war when both superpowers informed each other of military moves which might have been provocative or ambiguous. [1]