American and Soviet Teenagers' Concerns about Nuclear War and the Future

Abstract

THE first survey of American adolescents' attitudes toward nuclear weapons and nuclear war was conducted in 1947.1 Despite World War II's having ended only two years earlier, almost half the 10,000 high-school students polled across the country believed the United States would become involved in yet another war, this time with the Soviet Union, even though they had just been allies and the U.S.S.R. had not yet exploded its first atomic bomb.This survey was not followed by other similar studies until the early 1960s, when the building of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban missile crisis stimulated scholarly interest . . .