It's tangential, but I hate "On the beach". Nevil Shute is a great writer. And he's technical too (he has a degree in aeronautical engineering). His other books are great. And this book is great too, except ...
Except that the book could have the subtitle "The greatest giving up story ever told".
First, the scenario of spiked nukes is not technically accurate; you'd need as much cobalt as we mine in 100 years to achieve that type of effect.
Second, even if the radioactive cobalt poisoned the lands, it would have done nothing to the oceans. Oceans contain billions of tons of uranium for example. But it's too dilute. A few thousand tons of cobalt would have not moved any needle.
So, you have a nuclear submarine and some other naval assets. It could have been a great Noah's ark story. But Nevil Shute was not interested in a Noah's ark story, he was interested in the story where there is no human alive after a nuclear war. Science be damned. I simply could not read the last 50 pages or so.
So your basic literary objection to "On The Beach" is that it isn't the book that YOU would have written. Fair enough, ultimately irrelevant for anyone except you.
But since you're couching your objections in terms of scientific accuracy, I think you might be interested in learning some facts that you appear to be unaware of.
• "On The Beach" was written in the mid 1950s, and published in 1957. But the first nuclear submarine (Nautilus) had only put to sea in 1955. She was tiny, and could barely sustain a few months' voyage, let alone carry enough food to keep her crew alive for the decades required to avoid fallout.
• Even modern nuclear submarines learn submarines are not designed to function without require regular access to external maintenance and food re-supply. (The USS Pennsylvania holds the current record for longest sustained submarine cruise -- 140 days at sea.) A larger surface vessel, like a a nuclear aircraft carrier, can sail much longer, because it's enormous, and has vastly more cargo capacity than any submarine -- but would provide no protection against significant atmospheric radioactive fallout.
• The enhanced radiation exposure from a large-scale exchange of salted weapons could last for decades. That's well beyond the food capacity of any submarine ever built -- and even further beyond their operating limits with only onboard self-maintenance.
• The uranium in the world's oceans emits radiation at a tiny, tiny fraction of cobalt-60. Co-60 has a 5-year half life, while U-238 (~99.3% of natural uranium) has a half-life of 4.5 BILLION years... So the difference in radiation output is a factor of a billion. Also, U-238 is an alpha emitter, while most of Co-60's decay energy goes into gamma rays that are much more difficult to shield against. I'm not aware of any estimates for oceanic radiation levels from enhanced-fallout weapons, but your comparison of cobalt-69 to U-238 is pretty meaningless.
• The world's cobalt mining/production output is determined by global market demand, not any fundamental physical limit on the availability of Cobalt. If either the US or USSR had decided to pursue a major enhanced-fallout strategy, they would have spent money to drastically increase the mining and production of materials they needed to make these weapons -- increasing demand raises prices, which encourages more cobalt mining. Basic market capitalism.
• Besides cobalt-59, there are a number of other candidates for "salting" jackets in enhanced-fallout weapon designs. Cobalt is merely one convenient option. As a large-scale strategy, it might be more economical to use a variety of salting materials, either in the same weapon designs or as different variants for specific purposes.
But let's be honest -- your real problem with this book is that it raises uncomfortable emotions that you can't cope with.
If you really cared about the scientific facts, you would have been motivated to research for yourself the facts that I just provided -- and you never would have posted what you did.
I read this book many years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it - in my opinion the movie did a good job as well, however I've found it increasingly difficult to find via online services (and even finding it on the high seas was rare, but perhaps that's changed)
When I read it my partner at the time was from an exUSSR country and validated the feelings of hopelessness, grift, and expectations of the future matched a lot of the personal experiences of people at the time
I was confused by this comment at first, because this post includes the "Poo-239" short story, the I realized it was an excerpt from a collection of stories entitled "Pu-239 and othe Russian Fantasies".
It's readily available online [1], just picked it up as that first excerpt was a great read. I particularly enjoyed the description of the laissez-faire attitude adopted by plant operators over years working in the same environment. Reminded me of my first tour as a merchant marine cadet and hearing an engine room alarm that sent my heart to my throat, but was all but ignored my the seasoned engineers. I'd quickly learn how frequent false alarms were. It's an interesting art differentiating between false and true alarms when all alarms sound identical. You really must deeply know a plant to do it effectively to realize a true anomaly. It's about context and learning the 'pattern of life' of the plant to sense what's truly abnormal.
The empire was collapsing on itself. USSR occupied nearly 1/6 of the total landmass, it had on the ground every imaginable element in the periodic table and yet it was not a self sustained developed country. Large part of it was corruption and constant stealing on every level possible, but also the fact that all of its economy was managed by what comes effectively down to a large Excel sheet - completely top down.
Gorbachev tried to turn it around and failed. Fortunately he was a great man because he had a lot of humility and he allowed to fall it apart gracefully (relatively speaking). This gave freedom (from Russians) to many nations, yet too many of them are still imprisoned within Russian Federation (the name is a hint - it's not Russia but a federation of many nations) and I think of it as a great tragedy, especially now, when mainly the minority nations are sent to kill Ukrainians and to get killed instead of Russians.
> he was a great man because he had a lot of humility and he allowed to fall it apart gracefully
Source?
> On 10 January Gorbachev addressed the Supreme Council, demanding a restoration of the constitution of the USSR in Lithuania and the revocation of "all anti-constitutional laws".[9] He mentioned that military intervention could be possible within days. When Lithuanian officials asked for Moscow's guarantee not to send armed troops, Gorbachev did not reply.
True, and this is why I added "relatively speaking". There was also Tbilisi massacre and the situation was very much on the edge also in Latvia and Estonia, but it all could have been much, much worse. He could have used brutal force and drowned all these independence movements in blood like was done in Budapest and Prague previously. Most importantly he accepted the withdrawal of Soviet armed forces from East Germany that eventually led to withdrawal of Russian occupation forces from all Russian occupied republics (except from less autonomous occupied territories on Russian SFSR).
I was remembering this story vaguely today out of the blue. I'm pretty sure I got to know it via some HN discussion (or was it Reddit, in better days?).
After taking a while to remember the details, I was surprised to see it hasn't been submitted (but mentioned in comments).
Thank you for your impression of the book, maybe I'll order it now.
