If World War III had broken out, how would history have remembered Samantha Smith?

[chankljp]

Sometime ago there was this excellent timeline here on this site, in which the Cold War turned very hot between the East and the West as a result of the Able Archer military exercise in 1983.

There was a part in the timeline in which shortly after the conflict started, famous leftists and anti-war public figures in the Western world such as Noam Chomsky and Jane Fonda would had to be place under police protection, as the public that was shocked and appalled by an apparent full scale surprise attack by the Soviets, would view anyone that was anti-war as a suspect at best.

In the discussion, someone suggested that Samantha Smith, who had sent out her famous letter to Yuri Andropov almost almost a year to the day to when TTL's World War III had broken out, would have been mercilessly mocked and marginalized by the now war frenzy and panicking public and media, and quickly forgotten by history as an irrelevant side note.

I, however, believe different. In that Samantha Smith will be used as a propaganda gold-mine by the Western media, and portrayed as the personification of the Western world who sincerely wanted to have peace, but was deceived by the evil, manipulative Soviets when they had planned for war along. And if she had perished during the war, she would have been elevated to an almost sainthood status as an innocent, well meaning young girl who was fooled like the rest of the Western world in the post-war cultural consciousness of the Western world.

In any timeline and scenario in which WWIII broke out between the Warsaw Pact and NATO, how do you think Samantha Smith would have been remembered by history?

 

[viperzero]

I remember that timeline, it was very good and I was basing an RP I was working on on it. as for the subject at hand, I think you have it on the button. She would most certainly not die in a plane crash in this timeline, so a lot would depend on her own outlook of events. she would only be in her early 40's if she lived to the present, a lot of time for the Historiography of the war to change.

 

[James G]

Sometime ago there was this excellent timeline here on this site, in which the Cold War turned very hot between the East and the West as a result of the Able Archer military exercise in 1983.

There was a part in the timeline in which shortly after the conflict started, famous leftists and anti-war public figures in the Western world such as Noam Chomsky and Jane Fonda would had to be place under police protection, as the public that was shocked and appalled by an apparent full scale surprise attack by the Soviets, would view anyone that was anti-war as a suspect at best.

In the discussion, someone suggested that Samantha Smith, who had sent out her famous letter to Yuri Andropov almost almost a year to the day to when TTL's World War III had broken out, would have been mercilessly mocked and marginalized by the now war frenzy and panicking public and media, and quickly forgotten by history as an irrelevant side note.

I, however, believe different. In that Samantha Smith will be used as a propaganda gold-mine by the Western media, and portrayed as the personification of the Western world who sincerely wanted to have peace, but was deceived by the evil, manipulative Soviets when they had planned for war along. And if she had perished during the war, she would have been elevated to an almost sainthood status as an innocent, well meaning young girl who was fooled like the rest of the Western world in the post-war cultural consciousness of the Western world.

In any timeline and scenario in which WWIII broke out between the Warsaw Pact and NATO, how do you think Samantha Smith would have been remembered by history?

This is the TL you mean, yes?
https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...timeline-of-a-third-world-war-in-1983.279881/
It is an interesting theory you put forth, one as a WW3 writer - shameless plug! - I hadn't thought of before.

 

[chankljp]

I remember that timeline, it was very good and I was basing an RP I was working on on it. as for the subject at hand, I think you have it on the button. She would most certainly not die in a plane crash in this timeline, so a lot would depend on her own outlook of events. she would only be in her early 40's if she lived to the present, a lot of time for the Historiography of the war to change.

This is the TL you mean, yes?
https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...timeline-of-a-third-world-war-in-1983.279881/
It is an interesting theory you put forth, one as a WW3 writer - shameless plug! - I hadn't thought of before.

Yep. That's the timeline that I was referring to. In fact, I first stumbled on that timeline while doing a Google search long after the timeline was finished, it was the reason why I joined this forum.

In the discussion, on the topic of Samantha Smith's fate in this timeline, I recalled some other users going as far as suggesting that if she happens to be in the USSR at the time hostilities broke out, the 11 year-old "Goodwill Ambassador" will find herself getting dragged out of the hotel by the KGB, lined up against a wall and shot out back along with any Western journalist, diplomats and tourists who suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain.

I just simply cannot see that, or the previously suggested hostile mockery from the West if she had been at home at the time, happening at all. I mean, you can't exactly accuse an 11 year-old for being either a CIA spy or secret communist. Instead I would imagine that both sides will try to bring her up and try to use her as a propaganda figurehead to show that they were the ones who wanted peace and was forced into war, breaking an idealistic young girl's heart.

And oh, this discussion is not just limited to the Able Archer 83 timeline. It will also be interesting to discuss how would she be remembered if the 'Cold War turned hot' happened after she had died in 1985 (for example, in one of the 'successful hardliner coup d'état aginast Gorbachev in 1989-1991' timelines). In those cases, how would her legacy have been remembered by history? I imagine something along the lines of a highly tragic figure, who was in retrospect, very lucky to have died young, never having to witness the brutal, harsh realities of the world.

 

[viperzero]

I think getting dragged out and shot is a bit extreme for post Stalin Russia, I mean just detain them.

 

[Dayton Kitchens]

I think getting dragged out and shot is a bit extreme for post Stalin Russia, I mean just detain them.

In Sir John Hackett's The Third World War, foreign nationals in the Soviet Union during the war were being dragged out and shot because there was nothing to feed them anyway.

 

[viperzero]

In Sir John Hackett's The Third World War, foreign nationals in the Soviet Union during the war were being dragged out and shot because there was nothing to feed them anyway.

well I mean if thats the case just eat them, why let it go to waste?

 

[chankljp]

In Sir John Hackett's The Third World War, foreign nationals in the Soviet Union during the war were being dragged out and shot because there was nothing to feed them anyway.

I think that up until the point of a nuclear exchange, killing a world famous 11 year-old girl (who was in the USSR in the first place as a result of being invited by Andropov!) will just hand NATO a massive propaganda victory, with the Western media using it to show how the Soviets are nothing but murderous madman who are just as mad as the Nazis, and launch a media camping to turn her into a martyr.

It will be far more productive to force her to do a ‘Tokyo Rose’ style radio show directed towards American troops fighting across the world. With her telling them how well the Soviets have been treating her and that they should stop fighting on behalf of greedy Wall Street Bankers.

After a limited nuclear exchange…. Well, at that point I things anything goes.

 

[ennobee]

Wouldn't a World War Three end with the mutual assured destruction of all of the civilized.world? I mean the common.trope at that time was that even with a conventional.war sooner or later someone would.fire.the first.nuke.and then the rockets would start flying until all of Earth was a radiating mushroom. This was the real reason for Samantha Smith and likewise minded activists: the knowledge that in the next war there would be no winners. We would all loose.

So if the war would stay conventional, regardles of the outcome, I think we would thank the Samantha Smiths of this world for keeping the nukes from flying, just as OTL we remember Gorbachev for ending the cold war, even if it ment that his side 'lost'.

 

[chankljp]

Wouldn't a World War Three end with the mutual assured destruction of all of the civilized.world? I mean the common.trope at that time was that even with a conventional.war sooner or later someone would.fire.the first.nuke.and then the rockets would start flying until all of Earth was a radiating mushroom. This was the real reason for Samantha Smith and likewise minded activists: the knowledge that in the next war there would be no winners. We would all loose.

So if the war would stay conventional, regardles of the outcome, I think we would thank the Samantha Smiths of this world for keeping the nukes from flying, just as OTL we remember Gorbachev for ending the cold war, even if it ment that his side 'lost'.

Well. Obviously this discussion assumes that: (1) A Western 'victory' in WW3. ; (2) MAD and nuclear does not occur, at lease not to the level of human civilization's total collapse.

 

[chankljp]

To further elaborate, this discussion can be divided into four main WIs:

• World War III broke out with the USSR before August 25, 1985 (The most likely POD that trigger it being Able Archer 83 or the Soviet Early Warning False Alarm on September 1983) and Samantha Smith’s death by plane crash got butterflied. She either:
  • Perished like millions of others during the war at the hands of the Soviets
  • Survives the war

Or:

• With World War III with the USSR being triggered by a post-August 25, 1985 POD (such as the 1991 Moscow coup), so she would still have died in the OTL plane crash. However, her legacy lives on both during, and after the war.

 

[Dayton Kitchens]

If the Soviets were losing 1,000 military personnel (and some civilians) nearly every hour of a conventional war, I doubt they are going to worry much about some foreign national child no matter how famous or how great the propaganda value.

The greater the war the more priorities get shifted.

 

[viperzero]

I don't think the 1991 coup is a good POD. The USSR was on its last legs and alone, not exactly able to take on the world.

 

[chankljp]

If the Soviets were losing 1,000 military personnel (and some civilians) nearly every hour of a conventional war, I doubt they are going to worry much about some foreign national child no matter how famous or how great the propaganda value.

The greater the war the more priorities get shifted.

Well, then in that case of the life of the 11 year-old "Goodwill Ambassador"ending in execution by firing squad, a sad casualty, one of many in the start of WW3, how will she be remembered by post-war history?

A tragic figure and a martyr, or a foolish child who was in way over her head, and was part of the problem in making the West lower the guard against Soviet aggression?

 

[Lost Freeway]

A tragic figure and a martyr, or a foolish child who was in way over her head, and was part of the problem in making the West lower the guard against Soviet aggression?

The former on the left, and the latter on the right.

 

[LeX]

I don't think that foreign nationals would receive particularly brutal treatment. They would be arrested and malnourished probably, and receive obligatory interrogations from the KGB, but shot? It would have no propaganda value and it's not like these people are dangerous to the Soviet Union.

 

[lawrencecostin]

FYI: Samantha was also a committed Christian and this has been stripped from her by many people in the modern secular world who are not comfortable with a religious peace activist. Many quoted versions of Sam's letter leave out her most overt religious references.