How the Manhattan Project Scientists Unwittingly Abetted the Vietnam War

The world could end in a lot of ways, so it's comforting to know that we can rule a few things out. Articles and Interviewsįive 'Scary' Experiments That Did Not Destroy the World Release you inner hipster and check out this vintage trailer for On the Beach. Gregory Peck? Ava Gardner? Nuclear radiation? Count us in. Want to know how close we are to the end of the world? Click at your own peril.įellow Shute-Heads, we'd like to introduce you to your new favorite website. As we watch the struggles of a diverse group of characters, we gain a frighteningly intimate understanding of what it would be like to live through such trying times.Īnd we haven't even mentioned that mysterious radio broadcast from Seattle. Still, all of that hard work paid off with the 1957 publication of On the Beach, which would go on to become his most highly regarded work.Īnyway, it's an eventful nine months for the characters in On the Beach-to say the least. We can imagine he was pretty busy back then, his days embroiled in the life of an engineer and his nights spent mining for literary gold.

Shute, in fact, had a successful career as an aeronautics engineer before achieving international recognition as an author. That leaves our characters with a mere nine months to make their peace and say their goodbyes.Īnother thing that makes this novel uniquely, chillingly realistic is that Shute backs up his plot with some legit knowledge that makes the whole scenario that much scarier.

After that? Yeah, you don't survive massive radiation clouds. That doesn't mean the Australians out of the woods, though: the radioactive fallout is heading south and will hit them by September. It's like everyone just hit an RKO outta nowhere on each other at the same time.įrom there, we catch up with a groups of survivors in Melbourne, Australia, which was far enough south to miss out on the war altogether. Roughly four thousand nukes later, the entire Northern Hemisphere is a heaping pile of rubble. Just look at how Shute depicts World War III: what begins as a tiny, regional conflict sprawls out of control through a series of betrayals and misunderstandings until, finally, the whole planet is locked in a duel to death. Written in the early days of the Cold War, On the Beach is a reaction to the growing proliferation of nuclear weapons. It may be less flashy, but this timeless novel has one thing that those modern masterpieces of post-apocalyptic panic can't touch-it's actually realistic. Before Mad Mad: Fury Road, before I Am Legend, before The Walking Dead, there was one true king of the post-apocalyptic genre: Nevil Shute's On the Beach.

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