Sunflower Summers

Sunflower Summers was a protester before the Great War who was present in the area that later became known as the Divide.

Background[]

She and the others with her were protesting against the United States military's decision to place nuclear weapons in the area, and she had a personal meeting with local base commanders. Her skeleton can be found in the Cave of the Abaddon, next to her diary (in a suitcase) and potentially Seymour if the Wild Wasteland trait was chosen.

She was either highly gullible or foolishly optimistic, believing that the commanders ominously-worded promise that the military was preparing "something special" for them was going to be full nuclear disarmament.^[1] Terminal entries from Commander Devlin found at the Third Street Municipal Building reveals this plan was for the protestors to be sent to Big MT as test subjects, with the logistics of the move being handled by General Wellesley.^[2]

Appearances[]

Sunflower Summers is mentioned only in the Fallout: New Vegas add-on Lonesome Road.

Behind the scenes[]

Sunflower shares several similarities with the real-life young girl Samantha Smith, who in 1982 wrote to Yuri Andropov, who was then the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. At this time the US was in the middle of the Cold War, and rumors of aggression with nuclear arms abounded. When Smith was 10 years old, she wrote the following letter to Andropov:

Dear Mr. Andropov,

My name is Samantha Smith. I am ten years old. Congratulations on your new job. I have been worrying about Russia and the United States getting into a nuclear war. Are you going to vote to have a war or not? If you aren't please tell me how you are going to help to not have a war. This question you do not have to answer, but I would like to know why you want to conquer the world or at least our country. God made the world for us to live together in peace and not to fight.

Sincerely,

Samantha Smith^[3]

Unlike with Sunflower, Samantha's letter was well-received, and she became a media darling when she was invited to visit Moscow with her family.

Smith was tragically killed in 1985, at the age of 13, when the plane Smith and her father were flying in crashed in Maine.^[4]

References[]