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Originally Posted by kennyc
I also have the pbook went to this page and yes. I did not remember the bathtub thing and the other pieces are all so brief and quick that I really have not paid much attention, but the clocks stopping, if literal and not poetic would indicate an EMP and the flashes etc, could be any kind of bombs, but still for me the rest of the descriptions of no life (other than apparently one case of apples, no fish, no animals, dead trees etc just don't jive with me if it were nuclear. Yes there would be dead animals and plants in the vicinity of the bombs but evidence of radiation or it's effects were not evident in any of the travels, but the complete absence of life was and I don't think that would be a result of nuclear destruction -- there would still be life scraping by in many many ways -- perhaps just hanging on due to nuclear winter, but certainly still there, particular in the water and oceans I would think.
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McCarthy was probably taking a bit of poetic licence with the aftereffects of nuclear war so he could give the reader a sense of just how unremittingly bleak everything was. Even in the heaviest areas of fallout, the radiation levels would be pretty low two weeks after the attack. Low enough not to pose any serious danger, anyway. You'd still want to stay well away from the actual ground zero areas, of course, as they would be quite radioactive for a very long time to come.
No question that some animals would survive, simply because they would have been in areas that got little or no fallout. However, in large parts of the US eastern seaboard, where the story appears to be set, there'd be a lot of dead animals -and people too. Fish would survive anywhere because fallout only contaminates the top layer of a body of water and any radioactivity would be neutralized by the water itself at sub-surface levels.
However, nuclear winter (as an outcome of a global nuclear war) is a phenomenon that was debunked a long time ago. Sure, you would have some obscuration of the lower atmosphere for a couple of weeks in zones where lots of ground bursts took place. In such areas the temperature would drop a bit, but not permanently.
Having said all that, I also realize that The Road was not meant to be a realistic appraisal of the effects of general nuclear war.
