I know it's a video game, but is it just me or does it seem like a nuclear weapon would cause a WHOLE lot more damage than it has in the Fallout Universe? Namely Fallout 3. If a nuclear weapon directly hit the White House, everything within a 25 mile radius (at the very least) would be completely incinerated, in a realistic and modern manner. I remember reading a book that was written in 1980 or so that explained that a person standing 50 miles from a ground-burst explosion of a nuclear bomb would suffer 1st degree burns to any skin facing the blast. That's insane.

Also, I'd like to know what the heck hit Vault 87 that was so disastrous as to cause a rad level of 3,000/sec at the entrance.

No, your fairly accurate, the Bethesda team even admitted in an interview (believe it was part of some bonus stuff in the collectors lunch box) that a nuke would do a whole lot more damage, but they said the game woudl be rather boring if you made it realistic and I would tend to agree. Also keep in mind things in the FO universe work differently then ours, prime example are Ghouls, reality says they died shortly after of radiation poisoning, so its one of the things that you notice that are different. You can read up on most of the history and background at the wiki, but you have to take most of what you see and realize that it was done for the game, either the originals or this one.

Ummm dunno about the radiation, leaking reactor?

Or the developers of the first game had a rather lack of science/physics/etc knowledgments. So they just came up with something. That's why its not as our world.

Of course, we all know Fallout 3 wouldn't be fun to walk in an empty wasteland.. That's why they didn't use real physics for nukes.

For Vault 87, there was most likely a spill of radiation from barrels of radiation, or a reactor leak, like Si-Shen said.

As for radiation poisoning, it IS possible to be mutated by radiation and survive, but you're not going to become a ghoul. Ever see the movie 'The Hills Have Eyes'? That's basically what'll happen to your body. You will grow massive tumors on face, body, etc. You will be hideously mutated from an average American to basically what a Tracker in the Swampfolk class looks like. Except worse.

Actually, Vault 87 had a direct (or near-direct) hit with a nuclear bomb. Probably several, since it's still heavily irradiated. Perhaps sometimes after the Super Mutants started piling up radioactive waste when they realized that humans couldn't survive being exposed to that level of radiation.

Yeah, I figured they did it on purpose, but I wanted to see if I was going crazy.




But could a direct hit from a nuke actually cause that much radiation? I suppose it's possible, but that kind of radiation level seems like it would be caused by a nuclear reactor meltdown (Chernobyl) rather than a nuke. But the Super Mutant stockpile theory makes sense to me. I even recall hearing them in a conversation talking about 'needing more green stuff' in Vault 87 to create more Super Mutants. They could be referring to the FEV though.

I beleive the rads outside of Vault 87 come from the fact that the enclave used that vault to developed the FEV virus, now, why it isnt like that IN the vault too (for the most part) is beyond me

The White House (In-game) was hit by a suitcase nuke, from what I've heard. That would explain the lack of damage to surrounding structures. Vault 87, as everyone else said, is the result of Enclave\Vault Tec FEV experiments as well as supermutant stockpiling of radioactive material. But, given the fact that there is a person near the entrance with a radiation suit and Rad-X, it seems that this radiation could have been pre-war.

Also why the door is inaccessible, it is melted shut

If it was pre-war, they would be skeletons. Not full bodies with all flesh. This is 200 years ahead we're talking about. It is most likely someone investigating it, and telling by the suit, it was most likely BoS, Enclave, or another large group.

But still, the area around Vault 87, as in the ground above it and entrance, holds literally about 80 times more radiation than inside the vault near the G.E.C.K. chamber (or at least that's what it was for me and my rad resistance level). Something had to have happened outside it, while the radiation probably seeped through the ground, causing the smaller but still lethal amount inside.

Most likely BoS as Rothchild states they have been looking into the area but were unsuccesfull in getting past the radiation.

Hi there OP, let me give you a quick lession on nuclear weapons. You see, for most of my tour of duty in the Air Force, I was a missile launch officer. Meaning I sat in a silo and prayed to God almighty that we never had to do what we were trained to do. Now, that being said, let me tell you a little bit about nuclear weapons. They are not all powerful engines of destruction. Depending on the yield of the warheard, you could have damage limited to 1/2 a mile, to pretty much destroying everything in a 6 mile radius (Granted damage would extend out to about a 30 mile radius, but I'll explain a bit more on that later.) Most of the weapons that both the US and Russians field are well below that threshold. There was only one weapon system (that I remember, it was a very long time since I retired, sue me ) that would produce that kind of damage. It was a Soviet weapon system called the SS-18 It fielded a single warhead @ a nominal yield of 25mT. This missile was designed with one purpose, to eliminate NORAD HQ under Cheyanne Mtn. Also there were, IIRC few of these launchers. This would be the only weapon system that could produce the type of effects that you are thinking of. That being said, the Washington DC area, hell the whole east coast, would be turned into a parking lot by the sheer number of RV's that would be screaming in at all the military, industrial and of course by this stage of the game population centers. That says nothing for the bombers that would have survived whatever air defences the US had left. There is probably more I can say, but to be honest I need sleep and will post more tomorrow.

Personally, when i was looking at DC in fallout 3, and thinking about the whole fallout universe (in the first one, everything was leveled on the west coast by nukes.), and the ammount of radiation still preasent, I just figured DC was hit with nukes using a certain kind of radioactive isatope with low explosive potencial, and High, long duration Radioactivity, which would in particular was terribly hard to remove from water. As it is a fictional universe, and the fallout series had its own brand of science, though mostly similar to our own, but completely different, this idea to me seemed to cover alot of bases, and made the most sence all things considered. Taking into the historical backround of this universe, there being Literally no high quality fissionable material, and no crude oil, it makes sence. The Chinese would have had thier highly destructive nuclear weapons targeting the west coast, which was the staging area for the United States invasion of china, while having the dirty bombs pointed at the east coast. Tactically it makes sence, the dirty bombs would do thier job and take care of the american seat of government in time, meaning they would have difficulty surviving (Too bad the Enclave rushed all the important people out of there well before hand), as well as the american forces stationed there during marshall law. Seems to pretty well fit why Washington is still standing, and everythings still irradiated.

A SNUKE OH NOEZ :shocking:

What I wanna know is how the mutants managed to get Humans into Vault 87 to make more muties. Little people to the front, unaccessible door to the rear. Thinks that make you go, hm. Hehe, snuke.

Wow, crap.. I never thought of that.... I don't think anyone here did..

I did. I always figured they put them in some sort of lead box to bring them in. Nothing else makes sense. Of course, he door is melted shut... I wonder, they must have some other way in.

That would be a neutron bomb, a variant of the hydrogen bomb, designed to kill people and leave most of the buildings intact. Nasty stuff.

We already had lots of discussions about that topic here.


Summary is : Yes the damage displayed in the Capital Wasteland immensely downplays the destructiveness of nuclear weapons and the expected devastation of a global nuclear war.
Washington mostly looks less damaged than a city like Dresden at the end of ww2.

Gameplay and eye candy came before realism during the design stages of F3. Of course there is still room for suitable explanations for the Fallout canon.
It might be that Washington is an exception among the destroyed cities. Maybe it was only hit by a relitively low yield weapon like for instance a sub launched nuke and not a strategic one.

The dirty bomb and neutron bomb theories are also possibilities. But so far, Bethesda has not continued the official Fallout Bible so there is no definite answer yet. I still hope that someone of the F3 team finds the time to continue it.


Although it is clear that the F3 gameplay requires the current look of the Capital Wasteland, it somehow murders the credibilty of the Fallout world a bit.
It creates this "So civilisation broke down, but i dont actually know why when i look around in F3" effect.

If i were a designer on a Fallout game team, i would consider showing the players why the war of 2077 threw the USA back into the stoneage for 200 years. Maybe by leading the players to a place that reflects the total devastation of the great war. For instance, letting them visit a place that was completely wiped of the map to create a sharp contrast to the Capital Wasteland and let them realize the scale of what happened in 2077.

"The great Glow" in Fallout 1 was such a place.

I always thought that the Megaton town bomb was intended for DC and the reason why it doesn't destroy the capital wasteland when detonated is because the fissionable materials decayed over 200 years.

No; the half-life of all nuclear payloads is well above 1,000 years. There would've been plenty of material in that bomb to nuke a city after 200 years.

At any rate, the Megaton Bomb may not be designed to be city-destroying, but to kill off heavily-populated areas of the city; that way when you move in, most people are dead, but you have plenty of infrastructure you can repurpose.

The Megaton bomb is a u.s one. Its identical to those stored in Fort Constantine and also has the u.s air force roundel on it.
It was propably aboard a u.s bomber on its way to China which then crashed when DC was hit.


To the bomb : In the real world it would be highly unlikely that a nuke would still function anymore after 200 years.

I doubt that any conventional explosive utilized in nuclear weapons would still have enough energy to succesfully detonate the bomb after that time.
In fact, i think there is no type of explosive which could even retain 50% of its explosive potential for such a long time.

The explosives might still go off but they would surely fail to trigger a chain reaction.

Not to mention that after 200 years of exposure to wind and weather, corrosion would have worked its way into the bomb and opened it up.
Propably even eating most of it completely.

Good point. Nukes require the payload to be surrounded by a conventional explosive (such as C4) and for the explosives to go off at the same time to start the nuclear fission process. After being exposed to the elements for 200 years or so, corrosion would have probably rendered most of the connections that causes the detonation of the conventional stuff to be non-functional; therefore you may get a big boom, but you'll effectively have a dirty bomb, not a nuke.

Yes, age would have destroyed the bomb. The batteries would have gone bad within a decade, assuming modern tech, which may be out of place for Fallout. The pit doesn't degrade very fast, but some of the other materials used to boost performance will, such as tritium. (The "pit" is what we call the plutonium mass used for the Primary detonation.) I doubt the thing would have fired past 5 years.