Innocent Weapons Margaret Peacock Summary

In Innocent Weapons, Margaret Peacock argues that the public image of children fabricated by the conflicting superpowers is a microcosm of the wider domestic and foreign policy of the competing nations and can be studied to understand the evolution of Cold War rhetoric in the 1950s and 1960s.
Her examination is mostly chronological, beginning with the Stalin-era Soviet Union and post-war United States and their views of the model youngster and its counterpoint in each culture. Both nations used this “contained child” and establishment of childish innocence and the imperative of their happiness as an excuse to become more involved in its citizens lives. Peacock demonstrates how both superpowers demonized each other’s treatment of their children in order to gain support for their ongoing conflict. The late 1950s saw a shift in the governmental attitudes concerning children, specifically in regard to education. Each side began to see the merit in the

The image of kids was changing from victims to fatalities in the nuclear arms race with the Soviets. These anti-nuclear organizations promoted this notion that past, present, and future testing of nuclear warheads was threatening the well-being of the nation’s youth, and actively campaigned against it. This new wave of propaganda from private groups directly contradicted the government’s stance on testing, which resumed and even increased in the late 1950s and early 1960s. These organizations increased output of anti-nuclear propaganda involving fear, mothers, and celebrity endorsements and their efforts were ultimately fruitful with the signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963. American politicians even adopted these images for their own ends, whether re-election or in creating a new “national