Philosophy at the Movies

On the Beach

What does this 1959 film, based upon the Nevil Shute novel of the same name, tell us about the threat of thermonuclear war, and thought surrounding the notion of doomsday machines? How does the story relate to other films that explore the theme, most notably Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove? How does the story develop the idea of the so-called “cobalt bomb”? How do the American naval captain Dwight Towers and his crew cope with his knowledge that his family back in the United States has most likely perished? How do the Australians he lives and works with, respond to the fact that they have limited time before they die? The film portrays mankind as ‘keeping calm and carrying on’ in the face of imminent extinction nine months hence. Is this realistic? How does Shute’s story contrast with other works of post-apocalyptic fiction that portray chaos, the breakdown of social order, and a Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’? Which prediction is closer to being an accurate picture of human nature in such dire circumstances? Why has anxiety about the prospect of major thermonuclear war dissipated in the eight decades since Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Does the fact that no such war has occurred vindicate the thought of such strategic thinkers as Herman Kahn and Edward Teller? Why or why not?

Duration:: 46m
Broadcast on:: 09 Aug 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

You're listening to a radio stockdale podcast, podcasts that are inspiring, interactive and feature various discussions of leadership ethics and law. Welcome to Philosophy at the Movies, a podcast we discuss themes in the history of philosophy through the medium of films. I'm Alex Baker and joining me is always Sean Baker and today's topic is the 1959 film on the beach. And this is a film that is based on the 1957 novel of the same name by Neville Shute. And it takes place in the futuristic world of 1964. World War 3 has devastated basically everything across the world. In the book, there are more specific about what we'll get into it more about who started what. But long story short, a great exchange of nukes all across the world, the Northern Hemisphere is uninhabitable, even places in the Southern Hemisphere slowly starting to go away because the radioactive fallout is carrying over across the world. Us major band of survivors are hiding out in Melbourne, Australia. And there is a U.S. submarine commander, his name is Dwight Towers, and he works closely with part of the Australian Navy, got him Pete Holmes, and they're sort of working together. He's a liaison officer. They're one of their missions. They go through a number of missions, I believe in the book, we don't see it in the movie, but they go to the Northern parts of Australia to see how far this thing's carrying, where a civilization is still going, we don't see it in the movie, I believe. No, we don't. One of their missions we'll find out later on is that they are hearing a scattered sort of Morse code in the West Coast of America in San Francisco, but in the book it was Seattle, but in America. Oh no, it's Seattle in the movie, too, I'm pretty sure. No, they go to San Francisco. They go to San Francisco first, and then they go to that base. Yeah, right. Okay, I thought it was just, but anyway, they hear the scattered Morse code. They even say like it's not, it just sounds like gibberish, but they say that there were two words that were formed, water, and connect, but they don't really know what that means, so they don't know if it's what's going on, they got to investigate it. But as they're there, Dwight goes to peat hangs out with peat homes, like meets the family, and they sort of, the homes is, try to, they have a friend named Boyra, and they want her to show, you know, to white around the town, she likes to drink a lot, they bring a lot, she likes to drink, so just throw them all the hotspots with the parties, and they start forming a relationship, a friendship. She clearly likes Dwight, but he still brings up the fact that he's from Connecticut, and he has a wife and a daughter, so even though Connecticut has been obliterated by the nukes they've fallen, he's still, in his mind, thinks that they're alive. Yes, and acts as, he actually knows they're probably not, but he's chosen to act as if they still are. Yeah, he's still like, yeah, my kids, you know, when he grows up, she's gonna do this or that, in order to book the, he's asking her to, for a... Pogo stick. Pogo stick, that's what... For the daughter, and then something else, for the son, he has a son in the novel, I can't recall if it's in the film, but yeah, so he's acting as if his family is still alive, right, and he knows, intellectually he knows that they're not, and at one point, kind of touching in the book, I don't remember if it happens in the movie, you know, he admits what he's doing, essentially, with Marra, and says, "Does it sound crazy that I'm doing this?" And she says, "No, it doesn't sound crazy at all," because as she says, again, in the book and in the film, this happens in both, she says, "We're all actually going crazy or being mad in our own ways." Yeah. And so another character is a scientist named Julian Osborn, and that kind of sure looks like a dancer for something. Yeah. Played by Fred Astaire, we have to explain that reference. Nobody got it. Yeah, we're probably going to, for the younger folks, we'll have to explain who Fred Astaire is in the first place, and then, but he does a good job in this film, actually, as far as I know, the first time he, in a film, did a kind of serious, traumatic role, he did some in the '70s, he was in some of the Erwin Allen disaster movies, if I recall correctly, but I think this is the first one, and he actually does a pretty good job in that role. Yes, he is the scientist, and he's going on that expedition to kind of monitor the levels of radiation, and there's a committee that they are talking about, I forget the theory, but there is a theory that, well, the wind and all that stuff is going to diminish, and we might either will last longer. It'll precipitate out, or it'll miss us entirely. The hope is, what they've, I guess I should mention this, there is actually a factual basis in the thermonuclear technology, bombs technology of the day, there is a factual basis, that the whole story is premised upon, so-called cobalt bombs, and essentially what a cobalt bomb is, is it is a thermonuclear device, which remembers like a two-stage device, it essentially has a fission weapon that sets off a fusion, so you basically have something like Hiroshima, one of the Hiroshima bombs go off, and then you have material contained within that bomb that's close enough to the fireball that occurs there, that the heat is so intense that the nuclear material in that second set of material will actually hit each other, bond, and let off neutrons, and then start a chain reaction. But what they discovered, and actually the first person to do this, I think it's curious that it's him, a guy by the name of Leo Szilard, who was an instrumental Hungarian physicist who fled because of the Nazis, along with a few other Hungarian physicists, Edward Teller's another one. He actually had severe misgivings after having taken part in Manhattan Project, but you know, he very much advocated the project in the first place. Well, here he is again advocating something and making arguments for its uniquely deterrent effect, and then later on having second thoughts. It seems to be his MO, he's always doing this, but essentially the idea was you put cobalt, which is if you've ever seen cobalt crystalline form or ore form, it's a very dark blue kind of iridescent metal, it's really very pretty. So you take normal cobalt, you stick it in the material that isn't inside this thermonuclear device, and what ends up happening is because of the nature of cobalt's atomic structure. It's when it's subject to that level of neutron radiation, it will take in the extra neutrons and become cobalt-60, and then it quickly vaporizes. So you have, as a result of the explosion, a vaporous form of highly radioactive material that has a half-life of about five and a half years. Now, what you have to remember about half-life is that means half of the original material now has degraded, but you still have half of it still very much around. And ultimately, if you have enough of that material going off in a populated area, the movie gives you the impression that it'll be a livable area maybe after that five and a half years, but that's not actually accurate. It will take somewhere between 10 and 50 years for it to be safe for humans to inhabit the area for any extended period of time. So what you end up having to do is if at all possible, stick people very far underground, at least for that period of time. So it's essentially impractical. And the idea Zillard suggested in this essay and other writers kind of took up Herman Kahn as another one. He was a famous writer in strategic thinking with nuclear weapons. The idea is if you had something like this, enough weapons like this, and you let the enemy know you have them, and that you will use them in retaliation, nobody's going to choose to do it because it's essentially suicidal. And if it's the case that you on your side are going to try and develop these things, well naturally they will on their side, and so therefore there will be a kind of a stasis that develops and nobody will ever actually use the weapons. Now what ends up happening curiously enough is these guys making these arguments, they say still, you run a risk as long as humans are in the loop that somebody may choose not to use it, right? And once you do that, you create an imbalance. So some of them suggested, and we've seen this with Dr. Strangelove, that the best way to avoid that and make sure you maintain that balance of terror, so to speak, is to take it out of the human hands, put it in some kind of automated hands, the so-called doomsday device, something that would somehow or another detect the attack, and on its own initiated encounter attack, and make sure they say to make it impossible for the humans to step back in the loop and prevent it, then you'll have all the humans involved, both sides, or in case of this example, multipolar, right, because the Chinese, Russians, the Egyptians, and I think it was the Algerians, I always forget, no it wasn't, Albanians, the Albanians. So if they all have these automated devices hooked to these terrible, terrible high-yield cobalt bombs, and they all know that if somebody starts something, there's no stopping it. There's an extinction-level event for humans, and potentially for life on Earth. So nobody in their sane mind would start anything, but as we've seen in the fictional account in Strangelove, you know, it could be the case that there be a triggering event that is not predictable, not predicted, and certainly not intended, nevertheless, and then you'd set off these darn things and there's nothing you can do about it and we're all screwed. Something like that seems to have happened in this world, yes. So they go on that expedition, and they go to the travel around, they even go as far as Alaska, and they can't find any signs of life, as they go to San Francisco, one of the crew members was from there, and he just decides to abandon ship and spend the rest of his life there in San Francisco home, because it comes to radiation for us. And then they go, I looked it up, it was San Diego where they found the Morse code. Ah, gotcha. They go to San Diego, they investigate the source, and there's nobody there, there's no signs of human life, but they know there's power going on. They go to the source of the Morse code, they realize that the window was open, and there was a copepodel tied to the little loop thing on the window, so as the window's flapping, the copepodel points would hit the Morse code, maybe send a message, I guess apparently they did it so much that randomly they were able to get lucky and send the word water and connect, everything else was just random gibberish. Yes. So then they go back home and then they realize that, well, there is nothing left out there, we are the last people on earth. Yes. We go about, and then it's pretty much just the rest of the people are just living out the final two months of their lives. Yes. Pete is trying to get his wife married to realize that there's cyanide pills that are going around. Yes. We've got a young daughter, I don't want her to suffer. Once it hits us, we start feeling that poison, you just take it so you don't have to suffer, you don't want her to suffer. She's completely in denial, but he's trying to get her to understand that. And it doesn't happen in the novel, but Dwight and Moira in the book movie decided to have a relationship and have this, I wouldn't say a fair because his wife is dead. Yeah. The movie, he's in the book, he stays faithful, but they know that. And then the scientist, Julian Osborne, he has his old Ferrari and they're going to have a grand pre-race and they're going to move it up and you watch the race and it doesn't look because it's an intricate car chases, it's an Australia, and it's crazy because there's accidents going because people just have reckless abandon. So they're, you know, if they die in a car accident, it's like, well, I'll die two months earlier than anybody else, a big deal. So the car crashes everywhere. So basically he wins almost by default because he's one of the few cars that remained. Yeah. And they even make that more apparent in the novel, right? Yeah. It's a multiple race. There's a, yeah, there's an elimination, he elimination heats one day and then two weeks later is the final grand pre. And yeah, by the end of the race, he's just about, I think, the only vehicle left. So he wins by, like you say, by default. They don't care. Yes. They don't care. That's right. And then eventually it gets to the end. Yeah. People are starting to feel their radiation sickness and they know that the end's going to come, Pete and his wife, Mary, the Mary's finally accepted what's going on. They get prepared to take the pills, Dwight and Maris, each other one last time. Dwight isn't going to spend his last days with her because he's going with the rest of the American crew. Back to America. You're going to go back home. Yeah. The novel, it's more of, they just want to carry it out to international waters and then just. Scuttle it. He wants to scuttle the ship, blow it up, basically. And they want to carry out that last mission with him now as to why they want to do that. It's referenced earlier in the film that another submarine had done something like that over in South Africa or South America or somewhere because it's kind of a standard, a standing order that you don't abandon these highly classified and highly advanced submarines to potential enemy. Even though, in this case, there aren't any enemy left, he still feels duty bound to follow that standard procedure. And it's kind of neat how they present that in the novel because he's always operating under the assumption that the men, most of the men are at least a significant number of them on the ship will choose not to do that with him. They formed relationships with women in Australia so naturally he thinks they would choose to stay behind and he doesn't expect them to follow him in doing this. Scuttle the ship. But most of them do, most of them do. Again, a kind of a persistent theme through this film that people, as it were, carry on as they normally would even though there is this nine month window on their literal existence and the world's existence at least in terms of humanity and human civilization. People pretty much kind of have, as it were, the British stiff upper lip and they continue to carry on with their duties and day to day activities. And Dwight's just like them in that regard. The Americans are just like that in regards to the interesting, it raises an interesting question as to would people actually behave in that way? If they literally knew they had, you know, nine months to live or would you see social order dissolve? Neville shoots answers as you would not see social order dissolve and I think the reason he believes that I think is he realizes the resultant nine months or six months or however long it is that would be the result would be to use Thomas Hobbes terms, nasty, brutish and short, absolutely miserable. And Lara, who's behaves in a way, I think, more like that, so to speak, just becomes a self-indulgent alcoholic, all right? She's not as simple as that, is she? I mean, she feels an obligation, I think, to the others around her and feels kind of a wifely obligation to Dwight to lessen their suffering. She's thinking of other people first as our Pete and his wife as well, they're thinking of their daughter, right? And humorously in the film, but much more in the novel, you see people in Melbourne, the big city behaving that same way. You have several scenes with these two older gentlemen that are, I guess, relatively high society. And go to this club, I forget the name of the club, on a daily basis, and they're intent on running the operations of this club as if nothing apocalyptic is going to happen. And they have these running discussions over what to do with the excess of port and other alcohol, alcoholic beverages they have, and they're just behaving as businessmen. It's hilarious. But I think she's on to something here. I think that's the way human beings probably not all, granted, not all, but a good number of them would behave that way, because they see the alternative would be absolutely horrid. It would make that last six to nine months in absolutely living hell to do anything else. So I kind of liked the novel for this reason. Yeah, so at the end of the movie, nobody walks in at the end and saves it, everybody takes their capsules. And we've seen a Salvation Army group, and they're saying there is still time, brother, and that's how the movie ends. And it's interesting because this movie, it wasn't a huge hit, it wasn't a big box office hit. I think the book was popular, and maybe in Britain it was popular because Neville Shoe was a famous British author, but when you think about films about post-apocalypse or the World War III as nature, at that time the two think we talked about Dr. Strangel over the film that basically was also the same inspiration to fail safe. And there's others, but you don't really think of this movie. It's not a huge hit, and it got mixed reviews. The novel of Isaac Asimov, one of the most famous science fiction authors, he said it was just, he called it Tomorrow's Fiction, just like taking a movie, or taking this idea that's straight from today's headlines, and taking it and trying to make it a topical futuristic thing, and he didn't like it, and the, like I said, more, a number of critics didn't like it. So I wonder why, because people also said that it's not realistic. A scientist says it's irresponsible because even if there was a great exchange of nukes. Yeah. That's Edward Teller's argument. The entire world, every human being wouldn't be wiped out. There would be a good number of people still alive. Yeah. That's, because one of the things I was thinking about watching this, well, it's an Australian film. It deals with a post-apocalyptic setting, or the apocalypse. We can't help but think. I was thinking, did George Miller see this when he was working on the Mad Max movie? Who knows? But even that movie is about, yes, there's an apocalypse, but there's a number of people surviving. It's all gone crazy, but they are still in their own ways trying to survive, even with all the resources. There's still humanity out there. There's probably something to that. I mean, it certainly doesn't have a happy ending, right? And basically, they say it more than one occasion, at least in the novel, that Earth is better off without us, right? And there's an implication, also carried, that Earth is going to be barren of all animal life, at least, as well, even if even perhaps accepting things in the deeper ocean. But you can imagine, if the food chains destroyed as it would be, even the shallow level plankton, which is essential to the base of that pyramid, it disappears, and when everything else above it's going to disappear as well. So we're going to end up with a lifeless Earth, not exactly a happy ending. So that might be part of the problem people had with the film at the time. Now, I do have to point out, though, that it did generate a lot of discussion when it did come out. The scientist you refer to, who made the case that it wasn't realistic in the entirety of humanity, would not have been destroyed as Edward Teller. And he actually wrote a book, I cannot recall the title of that book, '19, I think it was '64, '65. He devoted an entire chapter to that film, critiquing that film, and basically making that case. So it did create a stir, at least in more intellectual circles. It was, we should point out that it was a lot of premieres internationally, Gregory Peck, I believe with his wife, went to a premiere of this film in Russia, the US ambassador to Russia attending a bunch of people from the Russian government. Yeah. So it was this international thing, because you see in the movie, they don't necessarily explain who fired first. Right. And there's an implicit presence of the doomsday device. Now that you mentioned that, that also reminds me that there was also a premiere in Great Britain. Winston Churchill liked this film. He actually said everybody, every statesman needs to watch this film. So you had a mixed reaction, it wasn't uniformly negative. But you're right, it didn't, as it were, pack as much punch in terms of critics liking it, and audiences liking it, as did Strange Love, or maybe Mad Max more recently, and Fail Safe. Now why is that? I'm not quite sure. I think it's partially the fact that it does have such a bleak ending. And it also might be the case that because it didn't lack either a comedic or a dramatic punch, as you have in all those other films, characters, like Strange Love, characters like Bucky Turgets and, you know, striking characters who are, to use the full sense of that term, bigger than life, right? There's no bigger than life characters in this film. They're all ordinary people. Maybe that just didn't make it stick. I don't know, but for me, it appeals to me a little bit because of precisely that reason. It's like shoot tried to sit down and think about, well, let's say the worst happens. How would the average normal person respond to that in society, not somebody who is in the upper echelons of government like Dr. Strange Love were the president or these senior level generals that are running North American defense, right? But the lieutenants, as in the case of Peter and the ship commanders in the case of Dwight and their families and these mid-level functionaries that they work with and the people at the clubs and the people running the grocery stores and the bicycle shops and all of that. He's focusing more on all of that and maybe that's just, I don't know what to say about, maybe that's just not interesting enough for people to have those kinds of characters portrayed. I don't know, but it's precisely why I like it. It's unusual in that regard with post-apocalyptic literature. It's not alone. There are others that do this. I'm thinking of one that I think should have been made into a film a long time ago because it does the same sort of thing. It's called Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. In that case, a disease wipes out almost all of humanity and you follow a very ordinary normal guy and a small band of humans that eventually collect around him and it tells the story for about 70 years after the fact and I think it's fascinating for that reason. It's not Mad Max. It's not crazy, you know, post-apocalyptic wars and all this jazz. It's just ordinary life. How would ordinary life go in this extreme circumstance? I think that's interesting to explore and I like it because it shoots, a message seems to be somewhat hopeful, although it's a dire circumstance. People wouldn't lose their inherent decency and dignity in that kind of a situation. That's his message, I think. Yeah, because one other British film looking at nuclear war we actually talked about not too long ago was Threads. Yes. And that was, there was no British stiff upper living movie. It's more bleak of just kind of saying these Threads that we depend on every day in our life to simple act of, let's say, going to the grocery store when you need food would be gone because everything supplies are cut off and it would just descend into, you know, primitive, horrible, Hobbesian world chaos, absolute chaos, everybody's out for themselves. People do barbaric things to each other on a regular basis. Humanity is at its most vile. Yes. And that's interesting, that's a British film. And it's also interesting that it's a British film from the 1980s, you know, as opposed to this film, which isn't British, but the novel is from essentially post-war Britain, '50s Britain, Neville Shute. I don't know what kind of a commentary that is on how people's views might have been jaundiced, I don't know. But yeah, you're right. That's the question, these kinds of films, these kinds of scenarios always pose for us. How would humanity respond to this kind of apocalyptic circumstance? Are we going to be savages or are we going to retain our civilized nature and do our best to try and restore civilization, even if it's on a micro level or not? And like I said, I kind of hope shoots right, I kind of think human beings would respond in the more positive way. It tends to happen when at least in small groups, people share adversity. They don't immediately start thinking about themselves, they start thinking about those people around them, usually family members, close friends, comrades in arms, you name it, when that occurs, they start thinking of each other first. And you kind of hope that will happen. But again, that's why I like the film, it sends that more positive message. Yeah, and even not like saying it would descend into hedonism, nihilism, chaos, anarchy, but even just people doing whatever they could to just live a little bit longer. There's in the book they talk about how they wouldn't necessarily be the very last people, they're like people in Australia, not in Australia, New Zealand, and kind of the neighboring islands around there, they said they might be able to hack it out in maybe another three, four months. Yeah, and they have all made the choice, it's interesting, I like this aspect of it too. They all say in essence, yeah, we could become refugees and we could try and go to these other places that haven't, the nuclear cloud has not over spread. But really, what's the point in that? It's just buying a couple more weeks. And it's curious that in the film and in the novel, Australia as a whole hasn't behaved like that. People in the northern parts of Australia apparently stayed in their hometowns and they haven't, as you would think they might, since it's the same continent in the same country, they haven't, there hasn't been waves of migration down toward Melbourne, they decide not to do that. How are you, man? The big thing at the time, fallout shelters, yeah, we're the fallout shelters, exactly. I figured somebody would build a shelter, hide in there, get as much supplies and then say maybe we try, if we can hack it three, four years, maybe see if the radiations died down, we can live again and live this like we did. They have apparently not done that either. And I was thinking, Pete and Mary's daughter is still an infant. I figured David, at least for her sake, I'd rather live at least maybe 18 maybe if they happen to get lucky, live a longer life for her sake. I think that's a little bit of a plot hole in the novel and obviously on the film, which is based. But I think there'd be a way to fill it. I do, given what we've talked about, the nature of the cobalt weapons, these super weapons and the extreme amount of time that dangerous levels of radiation would have been if the story holds here in casing the whole globe. Well, yes, you could go down in the fallout and they needed to do this explicitly I think. You could make the choice to go down in the fallout shelter and try and write things out. Problem is, you're going to need decades worth of supplies down there to even have a chance to survive it. It's unlikely people are going to have large enough fallout shelters to pull that off. But even if you think, well, let's wait five and a half years after the half-life has essentially taken out half that supply, that's not, and maybe we can go up to the surface, do some agriculture, find ways to get some more food, problem. If as many nuclear devices as are portrayed in this film had really gone off, there ain't going to be any way to do that. You're going to have basically a radioactive wasteland up top, so you can't do that. So it looks like a few if any people are going to be able to, as it were, take advantage of the mine shaft gap, thinking of a strange love again and have that kind of ability to stockpile massive amounts of food, right? Very few are going to be able to do that. Most people are not going to be able to do that. So they could have incorporated that into the film explicitly, and then they would make it much more plausible, I think, but yeah, they could, you know, you can imagine Pete and Mary thinking, yeah, we could do this, but we're still doomed. So why wait? And it might even be cruel to have our child wait. She grows up, becomes cognizant of what's going on, and then we tell her we all have to commit suicide, and might just be better if we do it now because it's inevitable. Yeah, you're thinking about the fallout shelters, no pun intended, but it makes me think of the hit show based on the popular video game that just came out, Fallout. Yeah. And they talk about the shelters, these things in the show and the game, I think they're called vaults. They're these massive underground structures where a couple thousand people can live. Yeah. Founded by Vault-Tec, but then you kind of realize Vault-Tec has ulterior motives. They do experiments on many of the people in the vault to test out how people would survive an apocalyptic setting. But in that universe, the people who didn't stay in the vault, there are still people who live because it wasn't just entirely wiped out. Yeah. It's a very kind of bad max like towns, people, there are people who try to keep order in civilization. There are military groups once called the Brotherhood of Steel. They have like things called knights and paladins and squires and their remnants of the US military trying to keep order. And then there are other like fascist groups that try to say they're part of the US government but they want to enslave people, they're other like scientists who conduct human experiments. There's all sorts of people. Some are good, some are bad and in the game it isn't in the show. You kind of try to navigate through the chaos and find the good people with the bad. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The position in that game too is probably that whatever kinds of nuclear weapons they used, there were ones with relatively short half-lives or relatively short, dangerously radioactive periods. They have a thing called mini nuke you can use on the game. It's just like a little fat boy nuke you can shoot at people and it gets a little mushroom club. It's maybe like the size of like a grenade. Yeah. Yeah. It's a tactical weapon or nuclear weapon. But that's kind of the genius of this one, taking full advantage of what was a hot topic back then when the film actually was produced in the novel, written in a cobalt bomb because that creates radioactive, highly radioactive material that just doesn't disappear. It stays for decades. And if that's the case, I was as reading accounts of how long human beings could actually safely be exposed to this kind of thing if it were to occur at any one time. And even like a decade to 20 years after, you can only be up in an environment with radioactive cobalt 60 for about four hours to 12 hours before you start getting serious radiation sickness as portrayed in the film. And that risk doesn't dissipate very quickly. Like I said, it's going to be decades before human beings can get up above ground again so to speak. And even then the chances of radioactive cause, cancer and other kinds of dangerous mutations are extremely elevated as compared to the normal background radiation that we have. And as compared to the kind of radiation background radiation that is caused by non-cobalt type weapons, like the Hiroshima device and so forth. We had that radioactivity fairly rapidly dissipate. Obviously people are living in Hiroshima now with no problem, right? This would not happen with these cobalt weapons, so you wouldn't even have the opportunity to have these kind of weird chaotic societies in Mad Max or Fallout form because there just wouldn't be any human stupid enough to go above ground would die very quickly. So you're never going to get that. So it's all going to have to happen below ground, if at all. Getting close to the end of my questions here, one thing we've been talking about other nuclear-related movies, one thing we forgot to mention was that you even bring up a teller but Oppenheimer. Yes. Best picture wonder which was swarable due at one point. Yes we will. But Nolan was talking about when he was making Oppenheimer talking to his kids when his kids were asking what he was doing and the kids say his children were saying, "Well, you know people my age, we don't really aren't really that concerned about, you know, a apocalyptic nuclear war." Yeah. And I'm just wondering if maybe now it's considered just because thinking, "Well, the last time it was used as an active war against people was Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That was 80 years ago. Since then there's been all these threats, there have been testings, but it's even at the height of the Cold War, even with something as close as we got to the Cuban Missile Crisis, it didn't happen." Yeah. Thinking well people talk about what's going on with Russia and the Ukraine, there might be fears, but I wonder if just maybe, you know, that maybe the youth are right, maybe it's not the issue it was in the Cold War, it's because it's just people are always afraid that actually it's a desert destruction. Yeah. We have to keep in mind the perspective time gives us, right, and we haven't had a major conflict, essentially since the Vietnam War and, well, Iraq and Afghanistan were major too, but a major global conflict. We haven't had essentially since World War II in the Cold War. You have to count that, but it was not nearly as kinetic as it could have been. So what you have, I think, people have internalized the fact that to their credit, the guys that came up with these doctrines of mutual assured destruction, and people like Herman Khan and Edward Teller and so forth, essentially their arguments based upon deterrence have been borne out by events. It certainly seems to be the case that most of the major states on the globe, particularly the ones that do possess nuclear weapons, have come to, like I said, internalize and realize that if they decide to use their weapons, they will be utterly destroyed in response. So we do have that stasis, these guys said would actually eventuate based upon this more or less rational analysis that they figured statesmen would take. So that being the case, and you're right, it's 80 years since anybody actually used one of these things in a conflict, young people didn't grow up with the possibility in mind that a major actor would actually use these things, because the empirical evidence is that they won't. They'll just have them in advance, point them at the other guy and say, "Look, you do something wrong. You know what's going to happen?" The other guy thinks the same way, so nothing happens of nuclear nature. We still have conventional warfare going on. Now what's, I think all should keep in mind though is you shouldn't become complacent because of the historical trend. What happens to the calculation, if you get somebody, or somebody comes into possession of nuclear weapons that isn't rational in that sense, maybe they think that it's well worth the price of their own extinction to start a global conflagration of some sort. You can think of some millenarious thinking, or there are some radical Islamic lines of thought that are something like this, right? Or you might have somebody, some kind of some weird variant of a very committed communist or something, that thinks that the only way to get rid of the capitalist system is to essentially blow the world up and hope that some people survive. There's always the chance that you'll get people of that nature acquiring these kinds of weapons, and it might even be inevitable as the technology gets easier and easier to develop, right, because once a technology is first invented, it's very difficult to do, very difficult to put together the devices, but as time progresses and auxiliary and supporting technologies improve, it's also the case it becomes easier to produce the object in question. Think about the first computer calculators. They were immense and very hard to build and took up rooms and couldn't do much, but compared to what humans could do, they were still pretty damn impressive. Compare that essentially to the handheld pocket calculator or smartphone today, which can essentially do the same job, and is also significantly cheaper. Well something like that may occur with nuclear weaponry, and then you'll get these crazy people, terrorist bands, or something like that, that could get a hold of these. In that case, I think, if it isn't inevitability, the younger generation still needs to worry about this kind of thing. Suppose that millinerious fanatic gets a hold of a cobalt bomb, can build a cobalt bomb, and uses it, well at least locally, that's going to be disastrous for somebody, and if you have the kinds of automated response mechanisms that are portrayed in this film and in Dr. Strangelove by the major powers, then you would have the untoward consequence of setting those things off and then you have your global kind of immigration. Now will that all actually happen? I don't know. I think there are still failsafes built into these systems, so that humans can get into the loop and stop them, and that's wise. But still, I mean the threat of, as it were, local uses of nuclear weapons, I think, is very much alive, especially with smaller devices that can be toted across borders that are porous. So I would say maybe the complacency with regard to the big actors on the world stage is justified, but maybe they are not who we should be worrying about at the present. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Philosophy at the Movies. You can find this podcast and more podcasts produced by the Stockdale Center by visiting the Radio Stockdale page at usn8.edu. This program is hosted by Radio Stockdale, where you can also listen to their podcasts such as Ethics of the Naval Warrior and the Dew River. If you like this podcast, you might be interested in my other podcast, Wheel Sounds, which it was so to dedicate to classic movie soundtracks that can be found online at thesonacinema.automatic.com. Until next time, I'm Alex Baker, and I'm Sean Baker, seeing so long, I'll catch you next time on Philosophy at the Movies. [MUSIC] (gentle music)