On the Beach: Wrong-headed Rightfulness
My wife and I just had the opportunity to see “On the Beach”, the anti-war picture issued in 1959 on the basis of a book by Neville Shute. It is the story of the Australians waiting until all would be killed by nuclear radiation that had killed everyone else in the world. I did not see it at the time it came out, because I was on the other side of the great divide over nuclear war. At the Hudson Institute about that time, I agreed with the rest of the staff that the book and picture were sheer propaganda. And they were. The idea that a nuclear war would produce a cloud of radioactivity that would over a period of months spread over the world until all humanity was destroyed misrepresented the understanding of what would happen even in the worst war. (Radiation would travel in dust clouds at much higher altitudes and much faster.) The idea that there was nothing anyone could do was also inaccurate. There were many forms of protection that even the Australians would know, and they should spend their time improving these defenses. Without minimizing the awfulness of a full-scale nuclear war, all would not be killed.
But as with many examples of exaggeration by scientists or others in such controversies, there was a good deal of truth in the confusion that would reign as to who actually started the war, and why anyone should have believed that war could be made so terrible that major war would become impossible (a notion stated very early by Winston Churchill and still widely believed today — hence our stockpiles — and presented as an actual issue in the discussion of “the doomsday machine” in Kubrick’s famous anti-war picture “Dr. Strangelove”).
A surprising number of arguments based on pseudo-science have turned out to be helpful in the long run. Ruth Benedict’s “Patterns of Culture” had a tremendous formative influence on anthropology and how we think about others, while Margaret Mead’s “Coming of Age in Samoa” changed the thinking of a generation about sexual morality. Both books it turns out were highly inaccurate, yet they perhaps expressed “a higher truth”.
Talking of “higher truth”, at my present age I can understand much of the dialogue in “On the Beach” as a treatment of the problems that people in their seventies and eighties face. They know they will die, and it might be soon. They know that there is essentially no escaping such a relatively early death. So the varieties of ways in which the characters in the movie face their individual and collective fates takes on a real meaning for many of us — certainly not the meaning that Shute had in mind.
