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In the comments section of [Do the Japanese believe that USSR dropped nuclear
bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki?](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/28927/do-the-japanese-
believe-that-ussr-dropped-nuclear-bombs-on-hiroshima-and-nagasak), it's
speculated that Japanese people agreed with a statement that the Soviet Union
carried out the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because the respondents
were thinking of the United States, but were confused by the similarity
between "USA" and "USSR".

Assuming that the survey was made in Japanese, is it plausible that "USA" and
"USSR" was used, and that a large number of native speakers would confuse
which country "USA" and "USSR" refer to? Alternatively, are there other terms
for the Soviet Union which could be mistaken for the United States?
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words loanwords
Are Japanese terms for the United States and the Soviet Union likely to be confused by native speakers of Japanese?
That's not likely to happen, as long as the survey was conducted in Japanese.

  * **USA** → アメリカ, 米国{べいこく}  
As like most nations outside US do, we prefer to abbreviate the country's name
to toponym.

  * **USSR** → ソ連{れん} (ソビエト)
  * **Russia** → ロシア
  * ( **"united states"** → 合衆国{がっしゅうこく})

If someone should believe that the Soviet Union was America, then it's another
failure of public education, but irrelevant to linguistic matters.

**PS**  
I Googled for Japanese source of "25 per cent of young Japanese people believe
that the bombings were carried out by the USSR" but I could find nothing.
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answer