I need to write an essay on the book ON THE BEACH by NEVIL SHUTE?

Question

I need to write an essay on the book ON THE BEACH by NEVIL SHUTE and it has to be on why the setting of the book was like that and any ideas?

Answer 1

Themes · Self-destruction; humankind's destructive relationship with technology; knowledge as both danger and salvation.

Major conflict ·  The characters cope with the reality that they are among the few people in the world left alive after a catastrophic nuclear war, and that within several months they too will inevitably die from radiation sickness.

Setting (time) ·  December 1962 to August 1963, one year after the end of a worldwide nuclear war.

On the Beach is a surreal journey into the darkness of the Nuclear Age. Our age.  Would the countries of 1963 (the time period the novel is set in) really have nuked the h**l out of each other for no sane reason?  This a antiwar novel with a grand literary tradition.  Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun (1939), and Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948) are prime examples of novels that realistically portray the madness and brutality of war. While Nevil Shute's On the Beach is not as well-known as these other novels, it carries a powerful message about the dangers of nuclear warfare.

Look at history and what was going on in the 60's.  

As a scientific phenomenon, the nuclear age began in 1945 with the explosion of the first nuclear bomb. But in world relations the nuclear age really began about ten years later. Until nearly the end of the forties, the United States was the only nuclear power in the world. In 1949, the Soviet Union exploded a nuclear device. But it was not until the middle of the fifties that the Soviet Union began to have an armory of nuclear weapons. Beginning about 1955, the West had ceased to have a monopoly of nuclear weapons, and by the end of the 1950s, the Soviet Union had become a very formidable nuclear power.

Since 1955 there have existed in the world two rival and conflicting coalitions armed with nuclear weapons. They are in conflict at many points on the globe. They distrust profoundly each other's purposes.

September 1961

As part of a campaign to reduce the United States' vulnerability to nuclear attack, President Kennedy advised Americans to build fallout shelters. President Kennedy's letter in the September issue of Life magazine set off a wave of "shelter mania" which lasted for about a year.

1963

April 10

An American nuclear submarine, Thresher , sinks in the North Atlantic, killing all 129 crewmen.

April 11

The Vatican releases, the Encyclical Letter Pacem in Terris , by Pope John XXIII , which calls for an end to the nuclear arms race. It states, "All must realize that there is no hope of putting an end to the building up of armaments, nor of reducing the present stocks, nor, still less -- and this is the main point -- of abolishing them altogether, unless the process is complete and thorough and unless it proceeds from inner conviction: unless, that is, everyone sincerely cooperates to banish the fear and anxious expectation of war with which men are oppressed.

June 10  President John F. Kennedy declares a unilateral moratorium on atmospheric nuclear testing.