Mother nature might allow lower life forms to mutate and maybe survive with radiation in the air but man can't mutate that much at all (cancer) but would die with radiation in the air. If there would be a nuclear war man would only survive for a short time with supplys that would go down with radio-contamination messing up what's left. So man could not survive a nuclear war.
shareWhich was the point of the movie, but for fictional purposes (and, presumably, because they weren't as many nuclear weapons around when the book was first written as compared to day) when the radiation winds start poisoning the air, it takes awhile for it to get around the globe (long enough so that we get to know the characters before they die).
shareI understand that cockroaches are unaffected by radiation. If radiation otherwise sterilizes the planet their food supply would be the irradiated and dried up but not decomposing flora and fauna.
shareMuch less badly affected than man, not UNaffected.
When the AEC and Department of Defense sent people onto Enewetak and Bikini Atolls (some of the places which had to be evacuated prior to and after above-ground testing in the Pacific due to fallout), they found that even though these places were still too radioactive for human habitation, rats and cockroaches were apparently doing fine, with normal numbers of arms and legs and such.
However, no way existed to determine how many of the local animals died some time between the detonations and resulting fallout and the point at which the personnel conducting the visit could safely go there. We may be looking at a situation where the most highly susceptible rats and cockroaches died not long after irradiation, and we have only general rules for determining actual age of any rats and cockroaches found by the visitors as opposed to "physiological age" caused by the combination of age, diet, intercurrent illnesses (if any), irradiation and exposure to other environmental stressors.
And now, most of the islands in the northern Marshall Islands chain are either habitable to man with no remediation or with limited remediation (such as potassium fertilizer spread on the ground to block uptake of cesium-137 by food plants, and scraping off of some of the topsoil where people will live).
In fact, the vast preponderance of illness in the Marshall Islands now is traceable to a crappy diet learned from US personnel assigned there, lack of regular exercise, and overall poor lifestyle. Many of the resulting health problems are labeled "radiogenic" in order to get otherwise unqualified applicants hefty reparations from the US.
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The fact remains that the radioisotopes in fallout from the world's current nuclear arsenal are too short-lived to kill as long after the nuclear exchange as On The Beach (book, movie, or TV miniseries) has them doing. After three-four weeks, we're not talking about the sievert-level dosages it would take to kill folks outright, no matter how many weapons go off. And even within that period, the distribution of fallout would be neither as wide nor as uniform as this story has it. Lots of people would survive; lots of land would remain livable.
Shute posited cobalt-jacketed weapons, something that as far as we know, no one has been daft enough to place in their military arsenals. The British played around with cobalt as a tracer in one of their above-ground tests in Australia, but apparently that didn't work out well enough to repeat; for unspecified technical reasons (according to Leo Szilard, the sheer mass of cobalt-59 required in the jacket for the weapon to be effective as a radiological weapon), the US Air Force dropped research into cobalt bombs in the 1950s.
And there's no SANE military or political objective which would require the use of cobalt-jacketed weapons. When research into enhanced-radiation weapons resumed, it was more along the lines of a pulse of prompt lethal radiation in the vicinity of the blast - "neutron bombs" - not fallout of the sort we see in "On The Beach."
Now, that leaves INSANE military/political objectives - religious cultists or secular megalomaniacs who want to depopulate large areas of the Earth (something that cobalt-60 with its 5 year-plus half-life would be suited to) so that they may be conquered generations later by the "righteous" - or simply to punish "infidels" or "Western imperialists" once and for all. The sort of activity that nonproliferation treaties won't prevent.
But even with cobalt-jacketed nukes, even the sort that Herman Kahn posited in "On Thermonuclear War" as "doomsday machines" with fifty-to-hundred-megaton yield nuclear devices floating in cobalt-59, human life would survive. There would be ghastly swaths of death and barren land, but not the entire planet. That's just not how fallout works.
There are fewer nuclear weapons in the world today than there were in 1963 and they have a smaller average yield. As they became more accurate, we reduced the yields. After all, I don't need a 40 lb 155 mm artillery round to kill somebody. If I can plant a cherry bomb flush to your skull it will provide plenty enough energy to do the job.
Cells can mutate due to radiation exposure, or they can die. If they do the latter, they will either not get the opportunity to do the former, or it will become irrelevant if it has already happened.
There is an indescribably complex difference between causing an oncogene and causing someone to grow a third eye or a second nose.
As the "radiation winds start poisoning the air" (for goodness sake, will you please read a non-fiction book and learn something real) and disperse around the Earth, their concentration gets thinner and thinner. The surface area of the Earth is over 500,000,000 square kilometers, or 500,000,000,000,000 square meters. A radiation concentration that begins high enough to be scary is diluted by millions to billions of times. People may face an increased incidence of illness and death, therefore a shorter life expectancy due to cancer, but they won't all drop dead in a few weeks, or a few years. That is why no sane person will ever build a "dirty bomb." The only person or people who it will kill are the idiots who plant it.
The best diplomat I know is a fully charged phaser bank.
Exaggeration
Did you know that radiation sickness can be cured?
Did you know that some pilots were ordered to fly through nuclear mushroom clouds in the 1950's and yet they still live today?
Sure radiation is bad (I certainly don't want to have it), but it is not a guaranteed killer, sorry
Radiation is like tobacco in that you can only claim: RADIATION CAN KILL but never say: RADIATION WILL KILL
Sure it can.
Get 1000 rads trough your nuts for 10 minutes and see how long you will hold on to life :)