“The short, bewildering war had followed, the war of which no history had been written or ever could be written now, that had flared all around the northern hemisphere and had died away with the last seismic record of explosion on the thirty-seventh day.” That sentence appears in the opening chapter of Nevil Shute’s alarmist 1957 novel, On the Beach. The story tells of a nuclear war that had destroyed the northern hemisphere. It takes place in southern Australia, about a year after that fictional 1961 war. Radioactive dust drifts slowly, but steadily south. In the end, all die.
Horrifying memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still vivid a dozen years later when Shute’s novel was published. Those memories were kept alive by John Hersey’s telling of what happened in Hiroshima in his eponymous and best-selling book, published in 1946. Shute’s novel reminds us that the consequences of a nuclear war would not be confined to the participating parties. The book tells us that events can overwhelm expectations and that hope based on a misreading of human behavior can lead to disaster. Mr. Shute wrote: “No one knows how the war started or how it escalated.” In his desire for a deal, at seemingly any price, with a rogue nation known for exporting terrorism and for lying about their assets and capabilities, Mr. Obama may have put the world at great risk.
