Content Warning: Includes discussions of suicide, and euthenasia of a child.
On The Beach is not a famous novel ("famous" in this context defined as, "even people who don't read books have heard of it"). But it's still pretty well-known, and I was prompted to track it down in dead-tree format after happening across Liam Pieper's mid-pandemic essay, On the Resolute Nihilism of an End-Times Classic. Pieper neatly described it as, "...a strange, dark novel – no plot and all coda … a book without villains, without antagonists, without conflict." Just the bleak inevitability of certain death, approaching at its own steady, measured pace.
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| Source: JSTOR Daily |
For those who mightn't know, On The Beach is a 1957 novel written by British immigrant Nevil Shute, set in the not-too-distant future of 1963. It’s been roughly 18 months since World War III, a "short, bewildering war … of which no history had been written or would ever be written now." Atomic bombs have completely annihilated the northern hemisphere, and now all that radiation is slowly making its way south, drifting on the trade winds and poisoning everything in its path. Basically, it's HBO's Chernobyl if they never put the fire out.
Our dramatis personae are: Lieutenant-Commander Peter Holmes, a young RAN officer who loves his family and the sea in roughly equal measure; his wife Mary, a rather sexist caricature of a dutiful 1950s housewife, who spends most of the book in the denial stage of grief; Commander Dwight Towers, an American submarine captain whose crew survived the war, but whose wife and children were back in Connecticut; Moira Davidson, another sexist caricature, this time of a good-time girl who is nevertheless the most sympathetic character in the book; and Professor John Osborne, a CSIRO scientist who initially tags along to be the Spock to Dwight's Kirk, but slowly develops more personality than either of our two leads.
They're characters, barely, but they're not heroes, as their circumstances leave them without agency: there's nothing for them to do. The closest thing we have to a plot involves a pair of long-distance cruises aboard Dwight's command, the USS Scorpion, but there's no jeopardy to it because everyone already knows what they'll find. Everybody in the north is long dead, and everyone in the south will be following them soon enough. The only thing left to do is decide how to spend the handful of months they have left, months that become weeks, then days...
The War to End All of Everything
Shute's vision for World War III involved such an absurd sequence of events that I can only conclude the absurdity was the point. The first time we hear of it, he tells us very little:
...[Towers] learned for the first time of the Russo-Chinese war that had flared up out of the Russo-NATO war, initiated by Albania. He learned of the use of cobalt bombs by both the Russians and the Chinese...
At first I had to assume this was meant to reflect the confusion of events that moved too fast for anyone on the ground to keep up. Shute lived through both world wars, after all, and surely knew the strange texture of front pages full of propaganda, guesses, disinformation and the occasional stray bit of truth that slipped past the censors. During Scorpion's first cruise, Osborne and Towers discuss the war in more detail, Osborne revealing at least 4,700 devices were detonated if the seismic readings are to be believed – probably more. Which was a pretty pessimistic estimate when the novel was being written, as that would've been pretty close to all the nuclear weapons ever built. By the real 1963 however, the U.K. had 211 warheads, the Soviet Union just over 3,300, and the United States more than 25,000, which makes Osborne's numbers seem positively Polyannish. The expansion of the U.S. arsenal in the late 1950s was a feat of genuine insanity.
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| Although the Soviet stockpile was hardly comforting either. (Source: Wikimedia Commons) |
The war supposedly started because Moscow needed a warm-water port (nothing ever changes...), their strategy to depopulate northern China so they could move in and take Shanghai; the Chinese counter-strategy was to revert the Soviets back to a pre-industrial people with no need for Shanghai. Both strategies involved blanketing large areas of the world with radioactive fallout, which brings about the consequences our cast spends the rest of the novel dealing with. It's worth noting, however, that although the novel technically has an omniscient third-person narrator, said narrator stays locked to our core characters and never weighs in on these matters. John Osborne has the seismic readings, but he doesn't actually know how the war was waged; similarly, Dwight Towers knows what the intel experts were predicting only weeks before his final cruise, but has no way of knowing if that's what actually happened. We only see what our main characters have see, hear what they’ve heard, so we’re allowed only a ground-level view of these vast events, creating a sense of realism and no small amount of claustrophobia. It's ironic that we feel most free during the chapters spent cooped up in a nuclear submarine – at least for that time we’re doing something.
That narrow, subjective view however is the only thing that salvages the weirdness that comes next. So far the course of events hasn't involved Britain at all, and for our extremely British author that cannot be allowed to stand. It takes a leap of imagination, but Shute finds a way to get nuclear weapons on London – a false-flag attack from that noted nuclear power, Egypt.
"The very first attack. They were Russian long range bombers, Il 626s, but they were Egyptian manned. They flew from Cairo."
"Are you sure that's true?"
"It's true enough. They got the one that landed at Porto Rico [sic] on the way home. They only found out it was Egyptian after we'd bombed Leningrad and Odessa and the nuclear establishments at Kharkov, Kuibyshev, and Molotov. Things must have happened kind of quick that day."
The Ilyushin Il 626 is a fictional aircraft, but it's also the least implausible part of that exchange. We don't need to look far for a reason a British author might be hostile toward Egypt, but come on. Ol' Nasser really must've been the Saddam of his day (as far as being the west's bogeyman, at least).
"The first one was the bomb on Naples. That was the Albanians, of course. Then there was the bomb on Tel Aviv. Nobody knows who dropped that one, not that I've heard, anyway. Then the British and Americans intervened and made that demonstration flight over Cairo. Next day the Egyptians sent out all the serviceable bombers that they'd got, six to Washington and seven to London. One got through to Washington, and two to London. After that there weren’t many American or British statesmen left alive."
So the course of this war is a bit strange, even a bit silly, but I'm still fairly sure that was the whole point. Events were confusing, and major decisions had to be made on the spot by low-level commanders. I have to wonder if a fair bit of this book is actually leftover trauma from the Second World War rather than anxiety about a Third. Shute didn't immigrate to Australia until 1950, but his description of the radiation coming south, of the cities of the Pacific going dark one by one, it sounds a bit like an echo of the nightmare days of 1942, when Hirohito's finest were popping up everywhere and seemed unstoppable. Similarly, his description of a society suddenly without oil hits harder when you remember petrol rationing wasn't that far in the past.
The Scorpion's Tale
I was a bit taken aback to realise Dwight Towers was the commander of USS Scorpion (SSN-589). Scorpion was launched in 1959, a couple of years after the novel's publication, and it sailed until 1968 when it was lost in an incident the U.S. Navy has never deigned to clarify. Someone almost definitely knows what happened, but speculation is rife that the Americans and their Soviet counterparts agreed not to talk about it publicly, so we'll probably never know. What we do know is that, along with USS Thresher, it was one of the two submarines Robert Ballard was searching for when he found the wreck of the Titanic in 1985 (the Navy's deal was, more or less: "We'll need a cover story so the Red Fleet doesn't come snooping... Titanic? Perfect! We'll even let you use any leftover budget to search for real, as long as you find our subs first...").
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| Scorpion's launch in Connecticut, 19 December 1959. (Source: Wikipedia) |
Scorpion was highly-classified military tech at the time, but Shute still makes her sound far more advanced than she actually was. Holmes ends up seconded as Australian liaison aboard the American vessel, and early on he takes a tour of her engine spaces:
[Peter] had never served in an atomic powered ship, and as much of the equipment was classified for security a great deal of it was novel to him. He spent some time absorbing the general layout of the liquid sodium circuit to take heat from the reactor, the various heat exchangers, and the closed-cycle helium circuits for the twin high-speed turbines that drove the ship...
Nevil Shute had an engineering background, so he likely had contacts within the emerging nuclear industry who could pass on rumours of what was in the pipeline. The sodium-cooled reactor wasn't made up like the Il 626 (it was an experiment briefly tried in the 1960s), but it would've been massive overkill for a mere attack submarine. Sodium's big advantage is that it runs hot, allowing it to transfer much more energy in high-output use cases, but it comes with matching disadvantages – such as the fact sodium explodes when it touches water. Might not be the best thing to put on board a Navy vessel, especially when they don't need nearly as much power as an entire city. The real Scorpion ran a very basic water-cooled S5W reactor, because that was all she needed (sound military reasoning, I'm sure you'll agree, especially when it would be maintained by edgy 19-year-olds).
There's some irony that the only vessel capable of traversing the rad zone is a nuclear sub. With spicy rocks providing infinite electricity, Scorpion was able to make drinking water and breathable oxygen out of seawater, so the only limit on her endurance was food stores (today, the standard line about how long a nuclear sub can stay submerged is, "120 days, or 5 days after the coffee runs out"). Their first cruise is a simple recon trip up Australia's east coast and around the Top End, checking in on Cairns, Port Moresby and Darwin. Darwin would've looked much like it did in Baz Luhrman's Australia, but the mention of Cairns and Green Island cut deep for Yours Truly. We as a family went on holiday there in 2000 to get away from the Sydney Olympics, and made some fantastic memories along the way. The whole section reads like a reverse Mary Celeste, where the ship is inhabited and it's the rest of the world that's eerily vacant – except we know why everyone's gone in this story. The radiation levels are so high an unshielded person would survive only a few days in Cairns, and even less in Darwin.
The Saline Solution
The thing that made me want to read On The Beach was the question of radioactive fallout: What did Shute know, in 1957? When did the public become aware that atomic bombs weren't just big firecrackers, and a radioactive Sword of Damocles was now dangling over all our heads? Because it manifestly wasn't 1945.
The guru on this stuff is of course Alex Wellerstein of the Nuclear Secrecy blog, and way back in 2012 he wrote about who knew about radiation sickness, and when. The scientists who developed the bomb certainly knew there'd be radiation effects, but apparently that intel never got passed up the chain.
J. Robert Oppenheimer never seemed to be very interested in that. Why not? It remains something of a mystery — how do you find out why someone wasn't interested in something? ...
Because Oppenheimer didn't know/care about radiation effects, General Leslie Groves didn't really, either. Groves actually thought he could march American troops through an area that was recently atomic bombed — had he been given the opportunity to do so, his ignorance would have actually cost American lives.
If Groves didn't know/care, then the Targeting Committee and Interim Committee, Secretary of War Henry Stimson's turf, didn't know at all. If Stimson didn't know, Truman didn't know. … They didn't really care, they didn't really know, and it never got passed up.
So I did some digging, expecting the tipping point to be the Crossroads Baker test, or maybe Castle Bravo (which I've briefly mentioned before). But the real moment appears to've been a radio broadcast by physicist Leó Szilárd on 26 February 1950. The true author of the Einstein-Szilárd letter, which kicked off the Manhattan Project (Einstein merely signed it to give it some clout – celebrity endorsements aren't new), Szilárd was a pacifist who, in the post-war world, was vigorously campaigning for nuclear disarmament. He was trying to scare us straight, warning that nuclear weapon technology would soon reach the point where we could end human life on Earth. I've been able to find neither a recording nor a transcript of this broadcast, sadly, but all the sources agree this was when Szilárd described the cobalt bomb, also known as the "salted" nuke – as in salting the Earth, to ensure nothing could ever grow there again. Which handily also answered my question about why this book (and films like Dr Strangelove) were all obsessed with cobalt.
Cobalt, element 27, is named after kobold, the German word for "goblin", because miners in the Holy Roman Empire found its bluish ores were poor in known metals and gave off toxic arsenic fumes when smelted. When isolated in 1735, it was the first new metal to be discovered since antiquity, and was named "cobalt" in honour of those long-suffering German miners. The human body needs it in trace amounts, as it's a component of Vitamin B12. Virtually all natural cobalt is Cobalt-59, a stable isotope with 27 protons and 32 neutrons. But if you place it beside a neutron source – say, a working nuclear reactor – it can absorb an extra neutron and become Cobalt-60, one of the most dangerously radioactive substances on Earth. Cobalt-60 has a half-life of 5.27 years, or right in the sweet spot to be harmful to humans – any shorter and it wouldn't hang around long enough to cause trouble (nuclear blasts result in some seriously spicy fission products, but they're virtually gone within 72 hours), any longer and the radiation would be so mild it's barely above background. Instead, Cobalt-60 emits three main decay release, one beta and two gamma – and the gamma decays both have extremely high energy. For this reason, cobalt rods are engraved with one of the most famous warnings in the industry: "Drop & Run".
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| There are jokes that it should just read, "You Poor Bastard". |
At the time of Szilárd's speech, cobalt rods were just being introduced as sources for radiotherapy machines – a revolution in cancer treatment – so the element was already in the public eye. Szilárd theorised that it wouldn't be hard to jacket a nuclear weapon in stable cobalt and let the neutron release of the explosion convert it all to Cobalt-60, which would then be vapourised and carried on the winds to God-knows-where.
According to Wellerstein (again), a 30-year-old physicist named Frederick Reines did some back-of-the-envelope calculations back in 1947 to work out what it would take to irradiate the entire planet. Assuming a uniform spherical shell around the Earth (that "spherical chickens in a vacuum" joke is barely an exaggeration), he worked out that it would take a staggering 900,000 devices to give the entire world acute radiation sickness, or ARS. However, the only devices available in 1947 were Fat Man implosion bombs of around 20 kilotons, so...
That does, however, work out to "only" 18,000 megatons, which, in the thermonuclear age, is not so much after all – that is less than the peak megatonnage of the US Cold War nuclear stockpile.
That equation also becomes even less comforting if you're talking salted bombs. Theoretically, around 500 tons of cobalt would be enough to cover the the Earth to a density of 1 gramme per square kilometre, with each gramme producing half a gray (0.5 Gy) of ionising radiation per minute (I know, I can hear physicists groaning in the background, but for our purposes we'll say 1 Gy equals 100 Roentgen. Yes, I know they're measuring different things). So 0.1 Gy would raise your lifetime fatal cancer risk but otherwise be unnoticeable; 1 Gy results in radiation sickness and unambiguous spikes in cancer rates; 3-5 Gy for just six minutes would kill half the population within 30 days; 10 Gy would mean 100 percent mortality rates within days. The timescale in the book, with total mortality occurring within a fortnight, seems consistent with exposures somewhere in the 8-10 Gy bracket.
It goes without saying, but ARS is one of the worst ways to die imaginable. Early symptoms include headaches, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, fever and skin reddening (i.e. radiation burns). Following this there may be a latency period where the patient seems to recover, sometimes known (without the slightest hyperbole) as the Walking Ghost Phase. With sufficient medical care, such a victim might live long enough to die of thyroid cancer or leukaemia instead, though at higher doses it starts to get ugly. Like Chernobyl firefighter ugly. If you really want to traumatise yourself (and I mean that literally – genuine content warning here), look up what happened to Japanese nuclear worker Hisashi Ouchi in 1999. Yes, the man who suffered the most agonising, drawn-out death in history was named Ouchi; this reality is being written by a hack.
Everybody's Dead, Dave
Later in the book, Towers takes Holmes and Osborne for another cruise across the Pacific, this time to investigate an intermittent Morse signal coming from a naval base in Seattle. It's not a coherent signal – they speculate it might be a lone survivor never trained to use a Morse set – but it's still a signal, which requires power, and there isn't supposed to be any power up there. Of course, it turns out to be nothing. The bombs haven't touched the nearby hydroelectric plants, so the power grid is still live, and it just happened that a window blown open by the blast is now depressing the key of a Morse transmitter. Every time the wind blows, the window rocks, transmitting gibberish. With that, the last flame of hope is extinguished, and our trio sail back to Melbourne and, effectively, become unemployed. There's nothing else to do now but wait for the end to come.
The grimmest thing anyone could do is introduce a child into this situation, so of course that's what Shute did. Peter and Mary's baby daughter Jennifer is just starting to crawl (by the end of the book she's teething as well); Mary steadfastly refuses to confront what's about to happen to herself and her baby. She has Peter bring her home a playpen (on the tram, no less), then frets that it's painted green, which contains toxic verdigris ("No, it's Duco. She'd need to have acetone in her saliva to get that off."). When a case of measles breaks out on the sub, she makes Peter sleep outside to avoid giving it to Jennifer. When Peter, gently, explains how to use the provided syringe to euthanise Jennifer when the time comes, she flies into an incandescent rage. H.P. Lovecraft famously wrote: "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." He was talking about a gigantic semi-divine squid monster, so we may be grateful he never lived to see the nuclear age: the horror would simply have been out of his league.
Letting her have her delusions, Peter obediently helps Mary plant a garden they'll never see, while Dwight and Moira carry on with their awkwardly chaste non-affair. That leaves John Osborne to save us by growing a personality. Late in his life (perhaps stimulated by the 1956 Albert Park meetings), Nevil Shute was bitten by the racing bug, and his new passion was written into On The Beach. Before the cruise to Seattle, Osborne shows off his new toy, a shiny red Grand Prix Ferrari: "It's the one Donezetti raced the year before the war," he says proudly. "The one he won the Grand Prix of Syracuse on." (Some echoes of Brooklands, there? The traditions of horse racing survived longer at Brooklands than anywhere else. Drivers were distinguished by coloured jersies rather than numbers, and were said to sit "on" their cars rather than in them.) Well, the Syracuse Grand Prix was real, but there was never a piloti named Donezetti (intriguingly, there was a Luis Donizetti, but he was a Brazilian F3 driver from the '90s). Although descriptions are vague, it's clear what Shute was imagining was a front-engined car, so despite all his engineering nous apparently not even Nevil Shute saw the rear-engined revolution coming.
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| Which is a shame, because if it was from the 1961-'62 era, that would make it one of the iconic Ferrari 156 "Sharknoses". (Source: Ferrari Fan Club of Riga) |
This machine Osborne intends to race in the final Australian Grand Prix, to be held at the fictional Tooradin circuit, presumably located near the town of Tooradin in South Gippsland. In geography it sounds like a loop of country roads, but in layout it sounds suspiciously similar to Phillip Island, which had opened a few years prior. We only see one of the qualifying heats, but it plays out as almost the platonic ideal of a motor race: with nothing to live for after the finish, everyone involved pushes to the absolute limit, with the result that even a mere heat ends with multiple fatalities. There's a scene later on where some paperwork needs to be signed in a hurry, so as the only person in the room with a functional car, Osborne acts as courier, roaring around the streets of Melbourne in a the Ferrari – the 1950s version of that infamous scene from Driven, I suppose. He does end up winning the Grand Prix, but it occurs off-screen, our heroes hearing about it on the radio – as if to underscore that this, too, does not matter.
At the last, we start hearing cases of radiation sickness in Canberra, and John reminds us that the official announcements are always a few days late: through his CSIRO connections, he's able to reveal there are already cases in Albury. In effect, the radiation is already here: their time is up. One by one they start to feel sick, struck by bouts of vomiting or diarrhoea. The Australian government has already distributed the necessary suicide pills, so all that remains is to decide when to take them. Osborne swallows his sitting at the wheel of his beloved Ferrari; Peter and Mary Holmes give little Jennifer a needle, then curl up in bed together to take theirs. Dwight Towers and a skeleton crew take the Scorpion out to international waters to scuttle her, wary of leaving tech like that lying around for just anyone to find. And Moira...
I've barely talked about Moira, but she's easily the most likeable character in the entire story. People have criticised Shute for writing female stereotypes, but I don't think that's the whole truth. Moira is dragged into the story by the Holmeses, her mission (should she choose to accept it) to keep Dwight company and make sure he's kept too busy to grieve over his lost family in Connecticut. Throw a whore at him, in other words; a loose woman, a party girl. Except she kind of isn't. When we meet her she's a hard-drinking twenty-something (what other kind is there?), but she and Dwight never quite get together. Their quasi-relationship is quite weird, chaste to the point that it starts to feel like Dwight is leading her on, and yet... when the Commander is too hung up on his lost wife to sleep with this younger woman, Moira understands. When he seeks a pogo stick to give to his (long-dead) daughter as a Christmas present, Moira has her old one from childhood refurbished and gifts it to him. She's a subtle contrast to Mary, who – despite being cast as a model 1950s housewife – is actually very selfish in her traumatised, completely forgiveable way. Moira, under the same circumstances, is quite stunningly generous. Fallen woman? Not in your life!
The book's final scene follows Moira as she farewells Dwight from the Williamstown docks, then jumps in her father's Customline and races the Scorpion down through, "Laverton with its big aerodrome, Werribee with its experimental farm … [then] passed the grammar school away on the left and came to shabby, industrial Corio, and so to Geelong, dominated by the cathedral." From there, she roars through Barwon Heads and doesn't stop until she pulls up beside the Point Londsale lighthouse. Her reward is one final glimpse of the Scorpion – just a grey shape eight kilometres away – knowing Dwight would be there, standing proud atop the sail. Then she recites the Lord's prayer, takes her pills and washes them down with a last hit of brandy, and because she was our last POV character, that's the last thing we ever know from this story. The last humans in the last city on Earth have been snuffed out.
Yes, it's a grim read. I saw one commenter who said they took it to read in their downtime in Afghanistan, and couldn't finish it because it was more depressing than the war. It's been adapted for film twice, once in 1959 (which was allegedly so bad it hastened the author into an early grave), and once in 2000, which suffers mainly from being low-budget made-for-TV slop. I can imagine another reboot being done by – pick a name out of a hat – Denis Villeneuve, master of the long, beautiful static shot that would really make Melbourne look haunting. I can imagine him shooting that last scene to resemble the Bridge of Death sequence from Episode 1 of Chernobyl, the same ominous slow-motion as the particles descend and swirl, the same whuum-whuum leitmotif signalling that radioactive Death has finally come. It'd be a hell of a way for the human experiment to end.
Truth Hurts
The superpowers never stockpiled cobalt bombs, but don't take too much comfort from that. It wasn't out of any ethical concern, it was simply because they don't make very effective weapons. "Dirty bombs" are just too unreliable for serious militaries, leaving them the preserve of terrorists and anyone else who doesn't have to worry about collateral damage. You'd never get the kind of even radiation coverage Shute imagined, especially not the kind that would produce the frequent "beautiful sunny day/empty streets" paradox that makes On The Beach so haunting. But the phrase "nuclear winter" wasn't due to enter the lexicon until 1983, decades after Shute's own final extinction, so he wasn't to know radiation alone wasn't the problem. On The Beach is an artefact of its time, a specific and applied case of technophobia captured and preserved like a butterfly under glass. But despite what Pieper said, it's not a nihilist text, not even slightly. Shute is far too good at making us feel really sad about everything that's happening for the reader to embrace it as a grand return to Nirvana. He just had the balls to point out that, if the end really was nigh, most people would carry on doing what they were already doing anyway. And that, apparently, is just too confronting for most of us to bear.
