Summary Of By The Waters Of Babylon

By the Waters of Babylon – Nuclear Dystopian Setting

In this essay I will be writing about the environmental setting of “By the Waters of Babylon” by Stephen Vincent Benét. The setting of this story is unequivocally important, as it fuels much of the plot. Without this story taking place in a dystopian society, after most life in New York had been struck down by a powerful nuclear weapon, this story could simply not have taken place. For when the surviving group of people touch any metal, which still carries radioactivity, they would die, leaving the rest to believe it was the work of the “gods”. It is told that these survivors have built a whole belief system surrounding their forgotten past, crediting the work to divine beings, rather than fellow men from a prior civilization.

To understand the current setting of this story,

Direct radiation occurs at the time of the explosion and can be very intense, but its range is limited. For large nuclear weapons, the range of concentrated direct radiation is less than the range of lethal blast and thermal radiation effects. Seeing that there was a total collapse of society in the story, it is safe to assume that this was a very large weapon, so I suspect that the city fell and succumbed to the weapon quickly – leaving behind the last two stages, radiation and radioactive fallout.

The initial radiation decays rapidly, as the isotopes used often have a notably minor half-life, but spreads from the impact area out to the surrounding expanses. Even so, beyond the blast radius of the exploding arms there would be hot spots that the survivors could not go into, due to radioactive contamination. This is where I consider some of the “dead places” to be, which is why the metals still carry a form of radiation long after the