Secret government telephone numbers

    The labels on these buttons, FO, F, I, P, for Flash Override, Flash, Immediate, and Priority, directly reflected the nuclear C2 scheme at the time.

Wait... was this the inspiration for Crash Override's handle in Hackers? The more I look, the cooler that movie gets.

Interesting that there are two levels above "immediate"

immediate (adj): Occurring at once; happening without delay

Lots of great stuff here.

> In the 1950s, a small city might have only one or two dozen trunks for outbound long distance calls. This means that only one or two dozen simultaneous calls outside of the city could be connected.

What this usually meant in practice was not that you'd get a "fast busy" and have to try again later, but that the only way to get a trunk (make a long distance call) was to call the operator and book ahead -- the operator would call you when a trunk was finally available to you, possibly hours later.

Even when this infrastructure was built out domestically, it remained for international calls in the US into the early 70s at least.

> In the UK, where telephone service was a state enterprise until 1984 and the first and second World Wars created a more expedient need, some type of basic telephone prioritization scheme has long been in place. Through WWII and the Cold War it was a simple one: in cases of emergency, all local loops not flagged as being required for emergency service would be disconnected. This had the dual benefit of freeing capacity for government traffic and denying an invading enemy the use of the telephone network.

These dual benefits were both true and terrible.

During the 1983 Grenada invasion, a navy commando's comms broke down, but famously one of them was able to use his phone card to call back to the USA and call for air support (https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2023/o...). So yes, enemies do use existing infrastructure they encounter.

But more to the point, we learned from all sorts of disasters (not just 9/11) that a lot of useful comunications happens ad hoc and if you cut off people from calling their spouse to check in ("are you OK? Do you have the kids with you?") you also cut off important unplanned communication ("Hey, this is hospital X. We're out of type a blood -- can wer get some from you or send some patients your way?")

> During the Cold War era, an attack on the US was assumed to be a nuclear one, and most likely an all-out nuclear campaign. The end result is that civil defense in the UK tended to be viewed as a practical system oriented around sustaining operations during an attack, while civil defense in the US was viewed as more of a theoretical exercise in preparation for reconstruction.

Despite the constitution's claim that the government should "provide for the common defense" it seems that most people interpret that as meanig uncommon threats (atomic war) and not common ones like fires and floods. As a result there is no defense in depth at a national level, so the main tools the government has are either bureaucratic (not a bad thing, gives us FEMA and the like) or with teams equipped for invading a resisting country.

> and although users might have to wait a while it is expected that after taking their phone off-hook they would get a dial tone eventually.

I wonder how many people know this. I'd think most people's response would be to toggle the hook, or just keep retrying. Which would just send them to the back of the queue.

> Despite the constitution's claim that the government should "provide for the common defense" it seems that most people interpret that as meanig uncommon threats (atomic war) and not common ones like fires and floods.

I mean, you realize that's not what the word "common" means in that context, right?

I guess I just question the naming. You have five levels of priority, but two are higher than "without delay"

It's sort of like "our amplifiers go to 11."