Nevil Shute's On the Beach warned us of nuclear annihilation. It's still a hot-button issue
- Written by: Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English, University of Sydney
A 1946 nuclear weapon test by the US military at Bikini Atoll, Micronesia.rawpixelOne of the most haunting poems of the 20th century, T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men (1925), concludes:
This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.
In 1958, on his 70th birthday, Eliot was asked whether he would consider writing these lines, probably...