On the Beach

by Nevil Shute

Re-read date: August 2025

Original read date: circa-2005

I first read On the Beach in 5th grade. The premise of the novel is that nuclear war in the northern hemisphere using Cobalt-60 bombs has led to the slow dispersion of radioactivity into the southern hemisphere, resulting in everyone slowly dying as the dispersion reaches them. The main characters live in Melbourne, though there is a trip in a nuclear submarine up to the United States.

It was on a small bookshelf in the back of my classroom at school. The shelf had books we could take to read at home or during an occasional hour on the schedule for unsupervised reading, and most of them were what you would expect. On the Beach, a novel about the aftermath of nuclear war where everyone dies of either suicide or radiation sickness, did not fit in at all. I wish I had asked the teacher why it was on the shelf because it’s just not an elementary school novel. I still found it interesting back then and not too difficult. I was into submarines and science, and it has a lot to offer there. I also remember thinking that it was sad, but a lot of it clearly went over my head (a common problem for me in elementary school: I read Dune and a number of Heinlein novels that year).

I was prompted to re-read it 20 years later because my work these days has a lot to do with tracking radionuclides and associated health consequences. It’s essentially a novel about atmospheric dispersion of radioactivity, which fit in really well with what I was working on in summer 2025. It was also interesting to see that Shute assumed the submarines would have sodium-cooled reactors, which is a sign of how old it is. Sodium was only evaluated as a submarine reactor coolant in the earliest days of the US naval reactor program.

Outside of the science and technology aspects, Shute had a lot of interesting things to say about how people act when faced with something they can’t avoid. I found the scenes with children and family very sad, but the final chapters were gripping; it was an intense book. Overall, I am very glad I read it. It gave me a lot to think about.