Question

Why did Samantha's letter elicit so much attention?

Answer 1

Samantha was a fifth-grader from Manchester, Maine, who in eight sentences placed the folly of stockpiling nuclear warheads in human perspective.

Samantha wrote and I qoute “I have been worrying about Russia and the United States getting into a nuclear war,” she wrote. “Are you going to vote to have a war or not? If you aren’t please tell me how you are going to help to not have a war.”

She didn’t get was she believed was an adaquit response so she wrote a letter once again. this time to Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to the United States. That letter elicited a direct response from Andropov, which Smith received on April 26, 1983. Soviet authorities had made the letter public the previous day.

He told her that and I qoute “No one in our country — neither workers, peasants, writers nor doctors, neither grown-ups nor children, nor members of the government — want either a big or ‘little’ war. We want peace … We want peace for ourselves and for all peoples of the planet. For our children and for you, Samantha.”

Andropov then sent an offer to her and her family to invite her to come to America. Then the offer the Smiths accepted during the summer of 1983. She referred to that experience in a December 1983 speech in Kobe, Japan, where she advocated for an “international granddaughter exchange” designed to help citizens of nations in conflict interact with each other on the same personal level that she did with Andropov.