TIL Samantha Smith, an 11-year-old American girl who wrote to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov asking why the USSR wanted to wage nuclear war, was invited to the Soviet Union and became an international celebrity and symbol of US–Soviet peace during the Cold War. She died in a plane crash aged 13.

TIL Samantha Smith, an 11-year-old American girl who wrote to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov asking why the USSR wanted to wage nuclear war, was invited to the Soviet Union and became an international celebrity and symbol of US–Soviet peace during the Cold War. She died in a plane crash aged 13.