Would they have been nuked?
Mrs Voorhees is watching you!
No, there is no requirement to as those countries are no threat, and not in a strategic position either.
I live in New Zealand you see.
No known nuclear missle launch sites were located in either Australia or New Zealand (or anywhere else in the Southern Hemisphere) in the 1950's. The Soviet Union would (and did) target the known bases, primarily in the United States.
"At a time when cynicism masquerades as sophistication, [AWTR's] theme is worth touching upon."
As far as I know the Southern Hemisphere was not a target. In 1959, just before her left office (August 1959 in fact), the Commandant of the Strategic Air Command presented President Eisenhower with an estimation of the death toll if the US conducted a first strike against the USSR, a strike he recommended. The death toll was 600 million in the northern hemisphere. Ike was so shaken by the estimate and the recommendation that he sacked his old comrade in arms and warned Americans about the dangers of a runaway military industrial complex. There was no need to aim nukes south because in the 1950s, t he only nuclear powers were USSR, US, UK, and France but the US and USSR had medium ranged nukes all over Europe and in Turkey I believe (bombers). Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean was not nuclearized until 1967. Australia has been and hopefully always will be (right or wrong) an American ally but they were wise not to permit nuclear weapons into their country or to develop them although they were certainly capable of doing it.
shareThank you Roger-395 for this very imformative post.
share<Australia has been and hopefully always will be (right or wrong) an American ally but they were wise not to permit nuclear weapons into their country or to develop them although they were certainly capable of doing it.>
Wasn't the British atomic test site in central Australia?
Yes in the late 50s and early 60s. It's still an exclusion zone of course.
The US didn't move in until the late 60s and early 70s.
By the way, I have just watched this film. It's interesting being made at the time when the world was on the brink nuclear war. A fairly boring movie though. I rated it 6/10.
You state: "In 1959, just before he left office (August 1959 in fact), the Commandant of the Strategic Air Command presented President Eisenhower with an estimation of the death toll if the US conducted a first strike against the USSR, a strike he recommended. The death toll was 600 million in the northern hemisphere. Ike was so shaken by the estimate and the recommendation that he sacked his old comrade in arms and warned Americans about the dangers of a runaway military industrial complex."
President Eisenhower left office in January 1961.
Gen. Curtis E. LeMay was Commander-in-Chief of the Strategic Air Command from October 19, 1948 to June 30, 1957. He left the job when he was promoted to Vice Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force. He was promoted again in 1961 to Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, the highest office in the service. LeMay was succeeded as Commander-in-Chief of the Strategic Air Command on 1 July 1957 by Gen. Thomas S. Power, who held the office until 30 November 1964.
You see where I'm going with this. I can't imagine who you are talking about.
Ike was so shaken by the estimate and the recommendation that he sacked his old comrade in arms
and warned Americans about the dangers of a runaway military industrial complex.
There was no need to aim nukes south because in the 1950s
they were wise not to permit nuclear weapons into their country or to develop them
[deleted]
I'm sorry to say that Roger-395's post is largely incorrect.
Most egregious is his statement that the commander-in-chief (Roger-395 erroneously refers to him as the "commandant") of the U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC) recommended a first strike against the Soviet Union in August, 1959 and therefore Eisenhower fired this commander. At that time, Thomas Power was the commander-in-chief of SAC and he remained in that position until 1964, so obviously Power was not fired in 1959. Roger-395 is also completely wrong in stating that the head of SAC recommended a first strike against the Soviet Union. No commander-in-chief of SAC has ever even approached making such a recommendation. There have been studies estimating how much damage would be done to the USSR by a U.S. nuclear strike.
Roger-395 is also completely wrong in the motivation behind Eisenhower's statement to beware of the military-industrial complex. After the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, it became widely assumed the U.S. had fallen behind in nuclear weapon missiles as well. This so-called "missile-gap" was used by John Kennedy to his advantage in the 1960 Presidential election with the assertion that the Republican/Eisenhower administration had let the U.S. fall behind the Soviet Union. In fact, as Kennedy found out a few months after taking office, the U.S had not fallen behind in nuclear weapon missiles. Nevertheless, that didn't stop plans to build well over a thousand land and sea-based missiles at a cost of billions. This is what Eisenhower was referencing with his warning in January, 1961.
I don't know where Roger-395 is getting his figure of 600 million people since that's more than 200 million more than the total population of the U.S. and USSR in 1959.
Finally, if they could have, I believe the Soviet Union would have bombed Australia and New Zealand. To the Kremlin, all of the English-speaking nations had allied together in WWI and WWII. Why would they do differently in WWIII?
"Would they have been nuked?"
Possibly not, the movie was made in 1959. At that time ICBM's were just getting fielded. and the USSR's would have been aimed at high priority targets in the US.
In the 70's or 80's bases in Australia defiantly would have been hit, in the early 60's? Maybe, maybe not.
If a day does not require an AK,
it is good
Ice Cube
Warrior Poet
Thanks. I read somewhere that South Africa was a Soviet nuke target due to British bases there so I assumed Australia may have been a target too.
Mrs Voorhees is watching you!
Well according to the multiverse, Skynet ignored Oz, The Kiwis & the South Africans--and sure enough they did provide a lot of the technical aid to John Conner & his "Tech-Coms"--one could say they were 'critical' to the fight.
shareIs that like wiki? Do you have a link to that.
If a day does not require an AK,
it is good
Ice Cube
Warrior Poet
It's a combination of supposition & (maybe not canonical) material & fan fic like The Sarah Conner Chronicles...it seems Skynet overlooked dosing the Antipodeans & the Boers with instant sunshine to it's later regret.
EDIT: Well, let me clarify; I grabbed A LOT of T2 material when the movie came out & some of it included 'stuff not used' & 'behind the scenes' logic by the script writers...also at least one site that I cannot find anymore made reference...long & short the story is this:
The Northern Hemisphere (North America, Western & Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Korea & Japan all got 'glassed'; the southern hemisphere was mostly spared. The fight against Skynet featured large portions of Manpower from South America & Africa & technological support from RSA & the Antipodeans.
ok, thanks.
If a day does not require an AK,
it is good
Ice Cube
Warrior Poet
"Would they have been nuked?"
the movie was made in 1959. At that time ICBM's were just getting fielded
I'm sure the Soviets would have had no compunction about targeting and bombing Australia and New Zealand. The OP's naïve belief that since those countries had no nukes they weren't a threat and were therefore "safe" is pretty silly considering how many peaceful, "unthreatening" countries have been attacked and overrun by aggressors throughout history; military aggression does not respect weakness or the fact that a nation is not a realistic threat.
All that said, I doubt the Soviets would have targeted Australia or New Zealand in 1959 for the simple reason they did not have the capacity to do so. They lacked an adequate number of missiles, had a limited Navy and bomber fleet to reach such distant lands, and had to concentrate everything they had in Europe and North America. Those countries would certainly have been "safe", at least from direct attack, simply because the nuclear powers had bigger fish to, literally, fry. (Incidentally, one poster said that France was one of the nuclear powers of the 1950s. Not so; France did not enter the "nuclear club" until 1960. Close, however.)
However, what everyone here is overlooking is that in the movie -- though decidedly not in the book -- only Australia is left. This is explicitly stated several times. What that means, among other things, is that New Zealand -- farther south and east, more remote, smaller and even less of a "threat" -- has been destroyed...but not Australia. This is preposterous -- stupid, illogical, almost physically impossible -- but there it is. (And amazingly this same scenario is repeated in the lousy 2000 cable remake.) So, according to the movie, the Soviets did indeed manage to destroy New Zealand -- but Australia is untouched. Go figure.
(Although the movie does contradict itself on this point a bit. In the beach scene Peter asks the doctor about the pills he's heard are being used in Cairns and Port Moresby. Moresby is in New Guinea -- so apparently life did survive someplace besides Australia, at least for a while. One of many examples of this film's careless and sloppy script.)
In the book, the post-WWIII global scenario is much more logical and realistic: the entire southern hemisphere survives, for up to two years after the war, as the radioactivity slowly spreads south. Not just Australia, but New Zealand, most of Oceania, most of Africa, all of South America, and Antarctica survive the war itself. This at least is plausible, certainly compared to the ridiculous "Australia-only" scenario in the movie.
remember this was pre Neighbors, pre Crocodile dundee and Pre Minogue, the Ruskie's had probably never heard of Australia, still where using Flat earth map's and until Stalin saw Jason Donovan in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat had no reason to attack the Aussie's
shareGood thinking.
shareSeveral points-the book is set in 1964, so Soviet/Red Chinese capabilities were projected that didn't exist as such in 1959. The plot assumed the existence of a Cobalt 'dirty' bomb (something that was talked about in the 50s) and finally Australia was the last relatively large scale industrial power left in the southern hemisphere, not the last populated area-at the time there was little major industry or resources anywhere in south to support any research needed and once it became clear the end was inevitable, there was no reason to try to evacuate to Tasmania or NZ-the setting of the book and film is mostly Melbourne, the last large city left in the world and the rest of what was happening in Australia barely comes into it, let alone the rest of the far off world.
"What is an Oprah?"-Teal'c.
Actually, the book is set in 1963 (the movie is in 1964), and the war Shute imagined occurred in 1961. He did project nuclear capabilities that neither China nor the USSR would in fact hold in 1961, or for many years thereafter, and the cobalt bomb he envisioned didn't materialize.
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at in the rest of your post, however, though it sounds like you're talking about the book, not the film. If Australia was the last relatively large-scale industrial power in the south, that would seem to be a reason to attack the country, although it hardly seems worthwhile anyway. By "research" I assume you mean nuclear, but in a short war such research is of no use.
As to evacuating, here again I'm not sure what you're getting at. It wasn't a question of evacuating during the war, obviously -- where could anyone go if missile attacks were an option? In fact, no one except the handful of individuals with access to transportation could evacuate anywhere, especially to an island like Tasmania, but that only became a question after the war.
I also disagree that what was happening in the rest of the country, or in the rest of the world, "barely comes into it". True, all the characters are centered in and around Melbourne, but some action (the sub's voyages, and the early flashbacks) takes place away from there, and we're constantly hearing about what's happening elsewhere in the world, mainly as a way of measuring how little time is left.
Yes they would have been nuked. Despite no nuclear weapons, cities like Melbourne were still major manufacturing hubs that produced weapons, ammunition and hardware.
shareI got the idea from the book that the war ended very swiftly, with mutually assured destruction having occurred before the Eastern Bloc had a chance to plaster the Southern Hemisphere...
shareYou're correct, bastasch. But in the book (though this is unsaid in the movie) the clear implication is that the Southern Hemisphere was not attacked because thee were no military or industrial installations there of any consequence, and in any event the belligerents had their hands full fighting their major enemies, not countries far away that were in no position to even help their allies, let alone actively intervene. In fact, there's a discussion in the book where Holmes says "We gave England moral support. I don't think we had time to do much more than that." The war was too short for it to spread to "unimportant" areas.
Besides, the whole point of Shute's book was to disabuse people of the notion (common in the 1950s) that the Southern Hemisphere offered a safe sanctuary in case of a nuclear war in the North -- that it would somehow go on unaffected. He may have chosen the most apocalyptic way to demonstrate the falseness of this idea, but it seems to have had the desired effect.