One of my teachers read Alas, Babylon aloud to the whole class. I couldn't have been that old, but even then I could see it was a survival manual for the apocalypse. I didn't believe a word of it, and couldn't believe how anyone could. It sounded to me, as a youngster, like it was deliberately written to reassure us. It was a con. There was a lot of propaganda in those days about how to survive a nuclear war, remember fallout shelters? They wanted people to ask "How can we get through this?" instead of "How did we ever let it come to this?" Or even, "How do we get out of this ridiculous situation?"

"On the Beach" wasn't about nuclear apocalypse at all, and it was neither a survival manual nor meant to be reassuring. Nuclear war was just the metaphor that was used, it could just as easily have been an approaching collision with a planet-busting asteroid, a world-wide incurable plague, or an unstoppable invasion by space aliens. In those days, fallout just seemed more believable.

The scientific possibility or impossibility of the scenario was irrelevant. It was a meditation on how people deal with the the unexpected, and the inevitable. The Gregory Peck character, the sub's commander, knows full well what has happened and its consequences, but he spends his last day in Australia buying Christmas presents for his dead family. The Fred Astaire character, the scientist, hoards fuel and competes in a pointless automobile race he has no plans of winning--or surviving..

The key image that stuck with me was that telegraph key, tapping away a meaningless message...Nobody sending it, and fools across the world listening intently, desperately, to it. Sometimes, even the most narrow band signal carries nothing but random noise.