Samantha Reed Smith was an American schoolgirl from Houlton, Maine. At the height of the Cold War in 1982, when she was just ten years old, she wrote a letter to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov telling him she was worried about a nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union and asked him what he planned to do to prevent it. Andropov replied that he did not want a nuclear war with the United States or any other country and closed his letter with an invitation for her to visit the Soviet Union. In July 1983 Smith and her family spent two weeks in the Soviet Union, visiting Moscow, Leningrad, and Artek, a children’s camp on the Black Sea.
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| Samantha speaking with the press on her trip to Russia in 1983 |
Yesterday would have been her 50th birthday. Samantha died in 1985 at the age of 13 in a plane crash while traveling with her father but her plea for peace remains as relevant as ever today, as threats of nuclear attack are made during the current war waged by Russia in Ukraine.
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