On the Beach (Vintage International)

by Nevil Shute

“But if it was a mistake, why didn’t they get together and stop it? Why did they go on?” The captain said, “It’s mighty difficult to stop a war when all the statesmen have been killed.”

“Maybe we’ve been too silly to deserve a world like this,” he said. The scientist said, “That’s absolutely and precisely right.”

Inactivity was unusual for him, and irksome.

Some kinds of silliness you just can’t stop,” he said. “I mean, if a couple of hundred million people all decide that their national honour requires them to drop cobalt bombs upon their neighbour, well, there’s not much that you or I can do about it. The only possible hope would have been to educate them out of their silliness.” “But how could you have done that, Peter? I mean, they’d all left school.” “Newspapers,” he said. “You could have done something with newspapers. We didn’t do it. No nation did, because we were all too silly. We liked our newspapers with pictures of beach girls and headlines about cases of indecent assault, and no Government was wise enough to stop us having them that way. But something might have been done with newspapers, if we’d been wise enough.”