"On the Beach"
"On the Beach"by Coyote Prime
“Nevil Shute's novel, "On the Beach", is set in what was then the near future (1963, approximately a year following World War III). The conflict has devastated the northern hemisphere, polluting the atmosphere with nuclear fallout and killing all animal life. While the nuclear bombs were confined to the northern hemisphere, global air currents are slowly carrying the deadly radiation to the southern hemisphere. The only part of the planet still habitable is the far south of the globe, specifically Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, and the southern parts of South America.
From Australia, survivors detect a mysterious and incomprehensible Morse code radio signal originating from the United States. With hope that some life has remained in the contaminated regions, one of the last American nuclear submarines, the USS Scorpion, placed by its captain under Australian naval command, is ordered to sail north from its port of refuge in Melbourne (Australia's southernmost major mainland city) to try to contact whoever is sending the signal. In preparation for this long journey the submarine first makes a shorter trip to some port cities in northern Australia including Cairns, Queensland and Darwin, Northern Territory, finding no suvivors.
The Australian government makes arrangements to provide its citizens with free suicide pills and injections, so that they will be able to avoid prolonged suffering from radiation sickness. One of the novel's poignant dilemmas is that of Australian naval officer Peter Holmes, who has a baby daughter and a naive and childish wife, Mary, who is in denial about the impending disaster. Because he has been assigned to travel north with the Americans, Peter must try to explain to Mary how to euthanize their baby and kill herself with the pill should he be killed on the ocean voyage.
The characters make their best efforts to enjoy what time remains to them, speaking of small pleasures and continuing their customary activities, allowing their awareness of the coming end to impinge on their minds only long enough to plan ahead for their final hours. The Holmeses plant a garden that they will never see; Moira takes classes in typing and shorthand; scientist John Osborne and others organize a dangerous motor race that results in the violent deaths of several participants. In the end, Captain Towers chooses not to remain with Moira but rather to lead his crew on a final mission to scuttle their submarine beyond the twelve-mile (22 km) limit, so that she will not rattle about, unsecured, in a foreign port, refusing to allow his coming demise to turn him aside from his duty and acting as a pillar of strength to his crew.
Typically for a Shute novel, the characters avoid the expression of intense emotions and do not mope or indulge in self-pity. They do not, for the most part, flee southward as refugees but rather accept their fate once the lethal radiation levels reach the latitudes at which they live. Finally, most of the Australians do opt for the government-promoted alternative of suicide when the symptoms of radiation-sickness appear.”
Since April 21st we’ve all watched in horror as as an undersea volcano of oil has erupted into the Gulf of Mexico, by some estimates as much as 120,000 barrels per day. No one knows for sure because until recently BP has prevented independent access to the site. As the days have gone by the spread of the toxic goo reached first the shores of Louisiana, then Mississippi and Alabama. Now, it’s landing in Florida, making its way to the Atlantic and the Great Atlantic Loop current, to be eventually carried to Europe and beyond. And nothing seems able to stop it.
BP is drilling 2 relief wells next to the original site, and expresses confidence that this process will plug the rupture. No one believes anything they say any more, their lying and deceptions are known, and they can’t be trusted.The government has foolishly been reliant upon BP’s efforts to solve this nightmare, all ending in failure, and offers nothing of substance as an alternative. No one really knows what to do. If the relief wells fail, some experts are calling this an “extinction level event,” because it will poison the worlds oceans, killing the fish and plant life upon which we all rely for food and oxygen.
Are they right? No one knows. No one has answers or solutions guaranteed to solve this. The only time Mankind has ever faced a situation like this before was 70,000 years ago, when, according to genetic studies, climactic change reduced the human population of the planet to a mere 2,000 survivors, from whom we’re all descended.
Reading the articles and watching the news reports reveals only that no one really knows what to do, and a sense of grim, almost fatalistic acceptance of our futility is becoming apparent, from the citizens of the Gulf coast to the politicians trying desperately to put a positive spin of their attempts to remedy this catastrophe. Look at the faces of those involved, and there’s a grimness and fear eerily reminiscent of Shute’s “On the Beach,” where the survivors are trying to reconcile their lives with the certain knowledge of inescapable doom, and the futility of escape. No one speaks of the possibility of failure, no one dares, for to do so would force consideration of the end of all that we know and love, all that we are, and the loss of the future, forever. And none of us can do that. So we cling to our hopes that in the end it'll be alright, that we'll muddle through somehow, as we always have, however strongly logic screams otherwise, because we can't give up, and there's no other way for us. Shute's characters carried on as best they could, and so will we.
Whether the relief wells work or not, an environmental holocaust has been unleashed upon our world, and it will take decades to repair the damage, if we can do so. That’s the best case we can hope for. If the efforts fail, it may well lead to the eventual extinction of human life on this planet. Either way, like the waves of oil crashing onto the shores of the Gulf, we are all, all of us on this Earth, together on the beach.
- Coyote Prime
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