Atomic war was branded upon the consciousness of millions worldwide with sudden and brutal clarity 71 years ago this month. In the years that followed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in the wake of atomic testing and the inevitable arms race that began when the Soviet Union acquired the Bomb in 1949, the prospect of devastation on a scale previously unimagined became an inescapable reality. Naturally, atomic war became good cinematic fodder through the 1950s. But just about all those movies of the period treated the propect of atomic destruction either as outright propaganda to scare the citizenry, or as the plot-driver for a number of fairly forgettable B-grade sci-fi potboilers. The H-Bomb, which represented a whole qualitative and quantitative leap in the scope of possible annihilation, became metaphorically embodied in the form of the radioactive mutant Godzilla in 1954: a creature which was an indirect product of nuclear testing, particularly that of the Castle Bravo shot which dusted the inhabited island of Rongelap and the crew of the Japanese fishing trawler Lucky Dragon with dangerous levels of fallout when the winds took an unexpected shift in direction. But even this "serious" metaphorical statement of the dangers of atomic war was woven into the fabric of a giant monster movie. There still was a lack of any truly serious discussion about the potential catastrophe of a real nuclear conflict. What was often the case in the newsreels, radio news programs, and some of the early television panel discussion programs of the time, those dangers were glossed over by U.S. and state authorities who diverted the topic onto either the danger of the Soviet threat or the civil defense planning which was supposed to protect the balance of the citizenry but in actuality would have been only marginally effective at best. These spokespeople loved to present a picture to the public of a nation that, if properly prepared, could absorb a nuclear attack and eventually rise from the ashes again. Much of the media of the period was designed to lull the public into a false sense of security and squelch any serious questioning of the policies behind the production of nuclear weapons and their potential usage in a war. The last thing anybody in officialdom wanted was public exposure to any message that contradicted this party line. So when one little film came out in 1959 which did exactly that, the response of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, the United States Information Agency, and the Department of Defense was close to panic, prompting a campaign against the movie which was predictably negative and dishonest.
In 1958, director Stanley Kramer got the green light to begin production of the film version of Nevil Shute's doomsday novel On The Beach. Kramer had previously had rather good relations with both the United States Navy and the Pentagon, who were quite eager to cooperate with him during the production of The Caine Mutiny only three years earlier and had allowed filming aboard U.S. destroyers as well as offering up lots of technical advice to help the movie attain a good degree of accuracy where necessary. But Kramer's pipelines to both the Navy and the Pentagon suddenly dried up when he approached them for access and cooperation on this project. This was because this particular story would violently contradict the entire official public stance of the U.S. government that a nuclear war was survivable. In point of fact, On The Beach would be the first movie to state flatly to mass movie audiences that the only likely outcome of a nuclear war was human extinction, which was the thrust of Shute's novel.
The movie opens at an unspecified time after a massive global atomic war has resulted in the annihilation of most human and animal life on the Earth, either directly from the attacks on cities and military targets or from the fallout from the weapons used. The fallout clouds are drifting southward towards the last bastion of surviving humanity in Australia, who now have only months at best before deadly radiation dooms them to a lingering and painful death. The last operational United States Navy vessel, the nuclear submarine USS Sawfish, docks in Williamsport, near the city of Melbourne. Placed at the disposal of the Royal Australian Navy, the Sawfish under the command of Capt. Dwight Lionel Towers (Gregory Peck) is to set off after a fitting-out with special equipment on a reconnaissance mission towards Point Barrow, Alaska. The object of the mission is to verify the validity of a theory put out by a Prof. Jorgensen which offers a thin sliver of hope that survival might be possible if the rains northward have somehow washed fallout out of the sky, reducing the radiation levels down to a much safer margin. Capt. Towers is to be accompanied on his mission by a young RAN liason officer, Lt. Peter Holmes (Anthony Perkins), and atomic scientist Dr. Julian Osborn (Fred Astaire, in his first non-dancing dramatic performance at age 60) of the CSIR agency, who will perform the actual scientific tests at Point Barrow from instrumentation within the submerged submarine. The thin prospect of a future for humanity is very much bolstered when just days into the preparations for the mission, a strange and largely incoherent Morse code message is received from the vicinity of San Diego, California. Continually transmitting despite the impossibility of there being any survivors in North America, Adm. Bridie (John Tate) asks Capt. Towers to check out the source of the transmission since it appears a human agency must be the sender, even if it is gibberish. During the mission preparations, Towers is invited to stay at the home of Lt. Holmes and his somewhat childish wife Mary (Donna Anderson). With a new baby in their lives, Mary cannot bring herself to face the terrible reality of their inevitable doom and is easily upset by "negative" talk of any kind. This is seen the night of a party at the Holmes residence in which a drunken Julian is engaged in a furious argument with another party guest about who was to blame for the war and how necessary it had been to fight it:
"You scientists are the likely ones as far as I see! You built the bomb, you experimented with it, tested it, and exploded it!"
"Just a moment, Morgan—"
"Thanks to you chaps, a moment is about all we have!"
"Every man who ever worked on this thing told you what would happen! The scientists signed petition after petition. But nobody listened. There was a choice. It was build the bombs and use them, or risk the United States and the Soviet Union and the rest of us would find some way to go on living."
"That's wishful thinking if ever I heard it."
"I'm not against wishful thinking. Not now."
"They pushed us too far! They didn't think we'd fight no matter what they did!"
"And they were wrong. We fought. We expunged them. We didn't do such a bad job on ourselves. With the interesting result that the background level of radiation in this room is nine times what it was a year ago. Don't you know that? Nine times! We're all doomed, you know. The whole, silly, pathetic drunken lot of us! Doomed by the air we're about to breathe. We haven't got a chance!"
At this, Mary furiously cuts off the discussion, saying she won't have it. "There's is hope. There has to be hope! There's always hope! We just can't go on like this. We can't! We... we..." she insists before leaving the room in tears. Peter tries to comfort his heartsick wife, already dreading the prospect of months without him at her side and the possibility of something happening to him on the mission. For Holmes, the situation is even worse. Knowing that he might not make it back before the fallout arrives, he sets about obtaining in advance one of the suicide kits the government is preparing to distribute to the general population so that they can spare themselves and their children from death by radiation poisoning. He manages to get one of the kits, takes it home, and tries explaining to Mary what will happen with radiation sickness and how the kit will help end it. He then has to tell her that there's a dose for their baby as well, which horrifies Mary.
She refuses to hear any more of what Peter has to say on the matter and babbles about how a neighbor of theirs insists the radiation isn't coming to Australia after all. When Peter dismisses the neighbor as "a damn fool", Mary rushes from the room weeping. Meanwhile, Capt. Towers has made the acquaintance of youngish Moira Davidson (Ava Gardner), a friend of the Holmeses and of Julian as well. Matched up with the captain by Holmes as a well-intentioned diversion, the two become friends and Moira, who has been coping with her impending doom through drink and meaningless sexual liasons with other men, becomes strongly attracted to Towers. And while he likes Moira, he cannot respond to her advances. Because while intellectually he knows that his wife and kids back in New London, Connecticut are surely dead, he cannot accept it emotionally. He still speaks of them as if they were alive and well, and at one point accidentally calls Moira by his wife's name during some shenanigans at a beach resort after losing a boat race they were both entered in. It is after a night on the town when Moira fails again to seduce Dwight that he feels compelled to explain himself; a task which strains his self-control to the breaking point:
"You see... in the Navy, during the war, I got used to the idea that something might happen to me, I might not make it. I also got used to the idea... of my wife and children... safe at home. They'd be all right no matter what. What I didn't reckon with was that in this... this kind of a monstrous war... something might happen to them... and not to me. Well, it did... And I can't... I can't cope with it! My kids... all the planning since the day they were born. Sharon... Sharon and I, we... well, see, we were the sort of people who... we would have been happy to grow old together. I-I can't accept it. I can't! Does that make any sense? Do you understand?"
The Sawfish proceeds upon her mission. Reaching Point Barrow weeks later, the sub takes atmospheric readings. The geiger counter shows radiation levels "thirty points into the red", which scotches the hopeful theory of Prof. Jorgenson but still leaves the anomaly of the Morse signal, which is still transmitting. Stopping first at San Francisco, somehow still intact after the war (the city had been destroyed in the novel) but deserted, the crew one by one look through the periscope at the dead city. One of them, Yeoman Swain, a native, deserts the ship. San Francisco is his home, and that is where he chooses to meet his own end, likely within a week.
Heading down to San Diego, to the site of a large oil refinery with hydroelectric power now pinpointed as the source of the strange Morse signal, the officers ask Julian who he thinks was responsible for the war which destroyed the human race. But Julian's answer is not one which any of them anticipated:
"The trouble with you is that you want a simple answer. There isn't any. The war started when people accepted the idiotic principle that peace could be maintained by arranging to defend themselves with weapons they couldn't possibly use without committing suicide. Everybody had an atomic bomb, and counter-bombs, and counter-counter-bombs. The devices outgrew us. We couldn't control them. I know. I helped build them, god help me... Somwhere, some poor bloke probably looked at a radar screen and thought he saw something. He knew that if he hesitated for a hundredth of a second that his own country would be wiped off the map. So he pushed a button. And... and the world went... crazy."
Surfacing in the harbor, Capt. Towers sends a volunteer, Sundstrom, ashore in full protective clothing, to find the sender of the Morse message. Sundstrom makes his way through the refinery complex, past the generators still humming away, producing plenty of electrical power, and finally finds the radio room. There, he discovers the "sender": a Coke bottle laying against the key of the telegraph, weighing it down while it's being tugged at by the cord of a window shade that snagged onto it. Sundstrom frees the telegraph key and sends a message to the Sawfish, which Capt. Towers receives with a definite black amusement. Sundstrom then shuts down the power generators and returns to the ship, thus putting an end to the last ever message from the Northern Hemisphere.
Returning to Melbourne, the officers and crew partake of what personal diversions and pleasures they have available to them in the time they have left. Peter goes home to his wife and child. Julian competes in the last Australian Grand Prix in his modified Ferrari racer, in a furious race in which the drivers throw all caution to the wind and are killed in multiple crashes. Julian wins the Grand Prix, a point of pride he will be able to take with him into oblivion. And Dwight, who has finally accepted the deaths of his family back home, and Moira, who has genuinely fallen in love with the captain, consummate their relationship during a fishing weekend in the mountains. It is a final happy time for the surviving remnant of the human race and one which is all too brief. Returning to Williamsport, Towers is called to the sickbay aboard the aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne. Ackerman, one of the Sawfish's crew, is down with the first symptoms of radiation sickness. Their doom is now upon them. Brisbane, on the northern coast, has ceased sending messages. The government now begins distributing suicide kits, as per the plan. Some Melbourne residents gather at a Salvation Army revival held under a giant banner proclaiming "There Is Still Time, Brother" to pray and seek understanding of the fate that has befallen them. Others queue up at the Queen Victoria Memorial Hospital for their suicide kits. Capt. Towers returns to the Sawfish. Gathering his crew together, he leaves it up to them to vote on whether or not to remain in Australia for the end or to try to make the now perilous and uncertain voyage back to New London to meet their deaths. The crew votes to return home to America. Back in their home, Peter administers the child's dose to the baby, and he and his wife, now resigned to their fate but still deeply in love, share a final cup of tea together. Dwight is met at the dock by Moira after he has phoned her. He tells her that the men have decided to return home and, being their captain, he cannot desert them. It is goodbye forever, but he tells Moira that he loves her. As the Sawfish is heading out to sea, Moira has driven out to a point above the beach overlooking the bay, where she watches as the sub submerges for the last time. The movie ends with scenes of a now deserted Melbourne, with the final shot being of the banner waving in the wind, still proclaiming its message of hope even though there is now no one to ever see it again.
On The Beach was and is a powerful and bleak movie. No room for a hopeful outcome was reserved. The world ends, period. No one is left. The final message was inserted by Kramer during one of his fleeting attempts to cooperate with the Pentagon but it had no impact upon their decision to completely freeze him out of all access or their subsequent decisions after the movie was ready for distribution.
When writing his novel, Nevil Shute projected a war (occurring five years into the future from the time of writing) which followed years of unchecked proliferation of atomic weapons to the point where even nations like Egypt had bombs. Worse, the atomic arsenals in Shute's world were thermonuclear weapons salted with cobalt. Cobalt laced bombs as radiological weapons designed to produce particularly "dirty" long-lived fallout to contaminate enemy nations were discussed as early as 1950 by physicist Leo Szilard and were a feature discussion point of the seminal paper "On Thermonuclear War" commissioned by the RAND corporation for the DoD and formulated by Dr. Herman Kahn. Cobalt bombs had made their way into the popular media through the 1950s and were central to the doomsday scenario projected in Stanley Kubrick's nightmare nuclear comedy film Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (1964). Briefly: Cobalt 59, when bombarded by fast neutrons produced in a thermonuclear chain reaction, is transmuted into the unstable isotope Cobalt 60, a heavy gamma emitter with a half-life of 5.75 years. This means it takes 5.75 years for a given amount of Cobalt 60 to lose half of its radioactivity. The radiation dosage from this isotope is several thousand times the lethal dosage for human and animal life, and even after the first half-life is expended remains "hot". Calculating upon that rate of decay, it would take about twenty half-lives, or more than one hundred years, for the radiation to fall to safe enough levels to permit habitation by unexposed human beings for long periods of time. But this means that an area contaminated by Cobalt 60 fallout would remain unsafe for a century, which negates all sheltering strategies based upon a two-week interval to emergence to the outside. Survivors would be forced to endure a mole-like existence in shelters for the remainder of their lives and their descendants for a substantial portion of theirs. No sheltering scheme in that time period which was practicable envisioned such a timeframe, and there would have been huge difficulties in preparing what would have to be whole underground communities to which the surviving population would retreat and remain within for a whole century. Shute, a weaponeer from the Second World War and therefore a man with some degree of scientific knowledge, did his own rough calculations to back up the premise of his novel, predicated upon the use of hundreds if not thousands of cobalt-laced weapons by more than a dozen combatant nations to produce the lethal fallout levels depicted in the plot. These scientific details go unmentioned in the movie screenplay, but as the possibility of cobalt bombs was being publicly discussed at the time of production, it was safely assumed that audiences would make the connection readily enough.
As outlined in Mick Broderick's excellent research article "Fallout On The Beach", a secret study conducted by the Office of Naval Research to advise the Eisenhower Administration during the process of formulating the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) which would serve as the basis for nuclear warfare strategy, did not include the possibility of cobalt bombs in the arsenals of the two superpowers. However, it did project that, even with the existing weaponry in said arsenals, there was enough megatonage to destroy over 80 percent of the populations of both superpowers in a "saturation" attack by each, either directly from blast and immediate effects, or by fallout contamination. This despite any sheltering plan then in place. The figure rose to 95 percent if 20,000 weapons were used in such attacks. The two superpowers had already built to a force level of 31,000 warheads, many of which were in the megaton range, which was alluded to in the original novel for the fictional war, depicted as taking place five years into the future.
However, this grim projection of the outcome of a nuclear war, which according to Eisenhower himself made such a conflict "preposterous" and certainly unsurvivable, did not prevent the organs of the military establishment from jumping all over Stanley Kramer's nuclear doomsday drama in an attempt to blunt or discredit it entirely. Because On The Beach not only depicted doomsday for humanity but did so in a way which directly contradicted the logic both of the U.S. government's civil defense program and more importantly that of nuclear deterrence and the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). During the 1950s, the U.S. and state governments conducted periodic civil defense drills in several of the largest cities in the United States, which required the populations to evacuate to shelters located within the urban areas and to remain there for hours at a stretch, leaving those cities effectively deserted during the practice alerts (much like San Francisco as depicted in the movie). And there was growing popular resistance to these drills, despite threatened jail sentences for refusing to obey orders to retreat to shelter for the duration of the exercise. And a nascent popular resistance to continuing nuclear buildup was beginning to take root. Furthermore, like the novel, the movie refused to state that the Soviet Union was the agent responsible for starting the war. The Eisenhower Administration, even despite the knowledge given to it by its own internal studies, felt the necessity to neutralize anti-nuclear dissent before it could take root in the popular culture and the body politic. While the USIA prepared a propaganda campaign to dismiss the film as "mere" science fiction (since it was projected as an occurrence in the "future") or to co-opt the movie into official propaganda campaigns advocating "safeguarded disarmament", and the State Department tried to prevent foreign diplomats from taking an interest in the movie and refused to cooperate with foreign screenings especially in the Soviet Union (which happened anyway when Kramer had already circumvented State to arrange a special premier screening in Moscow attended by a closed audience of 1200 Communist Party apparatchiks), the AEC prepared reports for Congressional special subcommittees dismissing the nuclear war projections of On The Beach by arguing issues which were completely irrelevant to both the book and the movie. Intended fully for public consumption, these baldly dishonest arguments were based upon the usage of a fraction of the weaponry in existing arsenals and the premise of the quick decay of Strontium 90 fallout, which "burned" down to safe levels after only two weeks and permitted the existing sheltering schemes to work, and therefore supposedly negated the scenario of the movie. Neither argument had anything to do with the premises of both the novel and the movie. The report also took issue with the projection of "hopelessness" and the premise of a human remnant who would elect to commit suicide rather than shelter for the two weeks it would take for Strontium 90 fallout to decay to safe levels. Again, this argument ignored the far deadlier and longer lasting Cobalt 60 fallout at much greater concentrations produced by the use of thousands of cobalt bombs, which made long-term survival an impossibility and lingering death from radiation sickness a certainty and therefore made the scenario of On The Beach a quite logical one. In tone if not in actual text, that part of the report nearly mimicked the confident projections of Dr. Strangelove in dismissing as "inconceivable" that survivors of a nuclear war would lack the spirit to undertake all measures to ensure their own self-preservation. The problem is that the novel and movie made this projection quite conceivable, and that was what sent the Administration into such a panic over the possible public reaction both domestically and internationally.
In the end, the movie On The Beach did prove a commercial failure, losing $700,000 short of its capital costs for production, though the original book continued to succeed as an international best-seller. But it did have an indirect impact which the Eisenhower Administration's propaganda failed to blunt. And it paved the way for media which openly questioned the logic and inevitability of nuclear war, presenting it as a catastrophe which had to be averted if man was to survive on this planet. Five years later, Dr. Strangelove would make the same point as black comedy, while the grimmer Sidney Lumet drama Fail-Safe parodied pro-MAD thinkers in the form of the sinister Walter Matthau character Prof. Grotechele. Through the 1960s, a Ban the Bomb movement arose in multiple cities both in the United States and worldwide and the public did challenge the rationale of both civil defense and nuclear war preparation.
Fortunately, nobody was actually stupid enough to build cobalt bombs. Though no formal agreement banning the things was ever negotiated, they were deemed impractical as weapons. But since then, scientific studies modeling the possible climatic damage wrought from a large-scale nuclear exchange still makes a worldwide nuclear doomsday scenario quite feasible, with the culprit being famine from agricultural destruction rather than worldwide dirty fallout. And the questions posed by On The Beach remain relevant today as much as they were in 1959. The chief one of these questions being whether or not human beings, in the face of doomsday, would cling to their humanity, their civility, and a basic decency, and meet their fate with dignity, or if they would succumb to their own inner demons and become no better than mindless beasts at the end. Nevil Shute believed in the former possibility, perhaps a bit optimistically, but perhaps not without some reason. Because indulging one's worst instincts would be totally pointless in a situation in which there is zero chance of escaping doom. So would people become beasts and end what remained of their lives in pointless violence, or would they find some nobility with which to meet the end, living each remaining moment to the fullest? There is ample precedent for both possibilities unfolding. And if the possibility of dignity is the more likely one, then also the possibility of finding the way to avoid doomsday also exists, by tapping into those qualities which make human beings civilized in the first place. In the end, that perhaps is the far deeper message presented by On The Beach which still has resonance in our present day: There Is Still Time, Brother.
Still time.
Fabulous post. Many thanks.
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