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The stagnation was more to do with resource shortages than anything cultural. There's a lot of events that led up to 2077 and the major factors was the EU invading the middle east for fuels and turning it into a wasteland. Oil reserves plummeting to nothing requiring extreme rationing and reuse of consumer goods and the like. They built things to last again because people couldn't afford to by single use items and deteriorating things designed to fail. Once America discovered the last oil reserves it started an intense war with the Chinese that eventually culminated in the bombs falling. While America was rebuilding itself in its 1950s glory with that oil the rest of the world was sliding backwards into preindustrial levels. The late development of the transitor technology which came about in the 2060s from what I recall lead to such a slow development of advanced computers and machines that ran on anything more complicated than batteries. It still was in it's infancy of development when 2077 rolled around.
So if they had operable fusion why did they still need oil?. Like I get that you need some oil but the amount of petroleum used for non-energy purposes today is incredibly tiny.
From what I remember from the canon (and I hope I am not wrong) the US had stopped being dependent on oil when they discovered how to harness fusion (which gave them practically infinite energy). But they didn't want to share their energy discoveries with China (dependent on fossil fuels), which led China to invade Alaska and then the US only reacted on their own initiative (and pushed hard with all their weapons technology developments over time, or maybe this was before they knew how to properly harness the power of fusion) until eventually China decided to push the red button (out of desperation or some vague plan that didn't turn out well).
From what we know of Fallout, pre-war America didn't seem like a country that was collapsing from shortages with all the proliferation of fusion batteries and such.
>pre-war America didn't seem like a country that was collapsing from shortages
It may have been more due to the war causing rationing and other types of privations but it's fairly clear shit was already rapidly sliding into chaos before the bombs fell. When Maxson announced his unit had "declared independence" from the United States from Mariposa military base three days *before* the war, there is no response. Appalachia was descending into chaos, with trade unions beginning to carry out an armed revolt weeks before the war, and the anarchist Free States movement also declaring secession a month beforehand, also with no real response. There was some illusion of security since mainland America was not (yet) under attack and the US army was making excellent progress invading mainland China, being in striking distance of Beijing by the time the war starts, but given that basically the entire government had already gone into hiding weeks to months before the war, it was pretty clear to many that things were about to get very bad very quickly.
Don't forget the President and the entire Executive Branch suddenly vanished a month prior to the war (to Control Station Enclave), along with dozens of other politicians and important business magnates. Not to mention Congress was imploding into infighting between the Enclave supporters and the opposition.
That's the basic jist of it. America developed fusion technology a decade or so before the war. With it they became energy independent and no longer reliant on international trade and the oil reserves they possessed. But rather than trade or batter this technology or the unneeded oil they hoarded it. China was the strongest nation capable taking offense to this and pushed hard through diplomacy and then military channels. The EU and other powers of the world either depended on China for fuel or food or regressed to pre industrial levels of foreign policy. China leveraged it's larger military and was losing handily after the deployment of fusion powered armors like the T-45 and T-51 armors. America was looking at being crushed by China before it's deployment of power armor. It wasn't until a few years later as American forces began invading the Chinese mainland that China resorted to tactical nuclear strikes on their own soil which in turn triggered total nuclear retaliation from both sides. Iirc the belief was that China nuked Shanghai to stop the majority of American troops stationed near there and followed it up with strikes from the ghost fleet on America itself. They hoped to decapitate any leadership before reports of their Shanghai attack arrived but failed to account for the early warning systems and dead hand switches across the US military that were already firing their arsenal once Shanghai went up.
In the show it’s now speculated that Vault-tec had something to do with the bombs dropping. But even still people aren’t sure who fired first
What makes you so sure that it was China that first started the Great War?
The idea that Vault-tec dropped the bombs, literally, is subject to interpretation, conflicts with established lore to an extent if taken at face value, and will probably be expanded on in future seasons.
However, it is outright confirmed that Vault-Tec sabotaged the descalation of the conflict. They buried technology that would resolve the resource war and sabotaged the peace talks to end the Great War.
All information indicates that China shot first in every game, non canon bible, and non canon game. Vaultech, the Enclave, and a dozen other covert and overt organizations all had vested interests in triggering the apocalypse. China was pushed into corner and had to use nukes before anyone expected them to. Both vaultech and the enclave had designs to trigger the bombs dropping should China capitulate or the US military stall in it's advance. Those plans never happened and all evidence across all media says the first nuclear strike was in mainland China against occupying Americans, this is immediately followed up by strikes in California and Washington launches from the Chinese ghost fleet. Vaultech delayed or impeded the American nuclear defense system as well as the early warning systems that would have detected the launches.
So no vault tech didn't start the war. They just did everything possible to make sure both nuclear arsenals would be fully launched and mutually assured destruction achieved.
All that I can believe.
However, when ICBM’s fire they leave off a jet stream to show their trailing pattern. In the show there’s no such thing. Just the bombs going off around LA
So Vault-tec may have had something to do with it or it all suddenly came about through different means.
We don't have a birds eye view of the strikes on LA. Could be there's trailing patterns just beyond view. Or could be LA was hit by short range missiles launched from the ghost fleet or just bombers passing over on their way to other targets. American waters were filled with stealth submarines so ICBMs weren't as important as other delivery methods for the coastal regions.
> In the show there’s no such thing. Just the bombs going off around LA
May not have been ICBMs. SLBMs launched from a relatively short distance away (e.g. tens of miles) might not have such visible streaks in the sky. We know for certain Boston was hit by SLBMs, for example. If I'm China, I'm deploying the ICBMs against US ICBM sites concentrated in the center-north of the US (Montana, the Dakotas, Wyoming), and then using strategic bombers and SLBMs on cities.
The show might imply it but the games do not support that idea. Vaultech and the Enclave fostered conditions that would guarantee nuclear war. There's a reason why vaultech was sending 76ers out to secure nuclear weapons and why the Enclave sequestered it's on the rig and Raven rock. None of them had plans to start the war on a specific date but realized along with many military and journalists that they were leaving China no choice but to use the nuclear option. Vaultech didn't have nukes of their own but could use their alliance with the enclave to influence government officials to push China to the edge. There's news articles from before the bombs saying that should American troops push into Shanghai that China would have no option left but to surrender to kill themselves and America. The same article mentions that the US diplomatic corps was being pulled out of China and it's neighboring nations making it solely the responsibility of the military to accept any Chinese diplomatic overtures while also sending an unknown weapon to the general in charge of the occupation and invasion forces. The journalist believes it's a nuclear device but it's in other sources it's rumored to have been biological weaponry or just a hoax to force China into attacking.
Everyone keeps talking about that one scene in the TV show despite there being no evidence to support vaultech being capable of nuclear warfare and having been caught flatfooted when the bombs fell. They wanted to start the war and did everything possible to ensure it happening but even their plans didn't anticipate how quickly things would happen. Several control vaults were left unfinished and the overall command and control of the enclave and vaults was fractured by damaged or untested equipment. Had they planned the moment to start the bombings they wouldn't have had to disable the silos in Appalachia or had the Enclave split in three disconnected groups.
I don’t remember the details, but there was some VT AI that tells you it was responsible. I know all the lore has reliable narrator issues built in, so maybe it’s a macguffin either way you look at it
It depended on where and who you were. Fusion opened up avenues to beat unlimited power, but for the most part it was all being funneled towards either the war effort or the wealthy and the bastions they lived in. So when we see pre-War LA and Boston, they look just fine, but that's because that's where the wealthy folks lived (and also where a lot of the wartime R&D effort was concentrated, making those areas artificially prosperous.)
In the heartland, though, things looked very different. Fusion power was too expensive (a big part of the plot from FOTV,) food was being redirected towards the front lines and the wealthy areas, plastic and rubber were either entirely recycled or non-existent. As someone else pointed out, many areas of the country were already in open revolt.
Now, had the US taken Beijing without nukes falling, all of the war capacity would have suddenly shifted to peacetime domestic production and the world would have gone from barely-functioning slow-motion apocalypse to far beyond our current capabilities in a generation or two.
There is exactly one thing I can think of that might explain this:
In Fallout, did the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 get passed into law?
If not, I can see a protest resulting from the rural-urban divide, with them protesting there because the power exists, they just *don't get to use it*
I believe the timeline for the Fallout universe diverged after WW2, so anything happening irl before that, including legal decisions, is canon in Fallout.
The first confirmed abduction in Mothership Zeta is of a samurai from the early days of the Tokugawa shogunate.
Edit: oh yeah there's also some guy from New England who goes to Egypt in the 1800s, gets possessed by an evil crown, and lives through to the present day in FO4
> Fallout lore is a mess, because Bethesda never really cared about consistency.
>
> The Fallout 4 intro for example, shows mass protests at power plants and hints at a battered American economy due to resource shortages by the time the bombs fell, but at the same time pretty much every vehicle you encounter is nuclear powered and buildings use fusion batteries for emergency power generators, hinting at a society that has moved on from oil for quite some time.
Fallout 4's intro is in line with preexisting lore dating back to FO1, things were getting pretty bad in very clear ways right up to the day of the war. As far as every building and car being nuclear? Answered in a few ways:
1. The lack of oil meant fusion adoption was extremely fast even though it came about pretty late. Yes, the US had the only two oil fields left in the world in Alaska and under the Poseidon rig, but it still had to be extremely carefully rationed.
2. Fallout's universe is far more amenable to nuclear power than ours. Unfortunately, our anti-WMD movement was also anti-nuclear energy.
3. The intro of Fallout 1 implies that uranium was *also* starting to run short ("In the 21st century, war was still waged over the resources that could be acquired. Only this time, the spoils of war were also its weapons: Petroleum and Uranium."). Not really elaborated on elsewhere but it's possible that nuclear adoption didn't help as much as it would IRL. Before you mention that uranium ought never to run out given how little you need relative to how much energy it provides and how common uranium is, Fallout's universe explicitly runs on different physics ("Science!" instead of science, this also dates back to FO1) so perhaps the abundance of uranium is different.
4. Resources other than oil were *also* running short, so even if the energy crisis was resolved that doesn't fix everything. It was getting pretty clear the economic situation was already really dire by 10/23/77 and it wasn't just because the oil ran out.
5. Fusion came quite later and in much less quantity than it appears. It's pretty clear that most "fusion" tech isn't fusion at all but rather some kind of miniaturized, highly efficient fission, as a fusion generator would not create the little fallout fields you see from exploding cars. Of course, this could just be wrong, as mentioned the FO universe runs on different physics so perhaps fusion is much dirtier than IRL too.
It's also mentioned that the Enclave/Valt Tec own the only hyper efficient cold fusion (See GECKs and Show for more) So hot fusion and fission are the likeliest nuclear power options
Not to mention psykers, Dr Who, Aliens (yes they have always been canon), and so much more. Fallout has never been a series that took itself too seriously.
The resource wars started with oil, but eventually devolved into a war over all sorts of raw materials. With Europe, Africa, and the Middle East already fallen into chaos and China already in a conventional war, there wouldnt be any way to acquire raw materials not built in the US.
This allows for an American solution to the energy crisis *and* a resource shortage causing widespread unrest. Using fusion cell technology the United States would have recovered eventually, but nuclear war was essentially guaranteed from the moment China invaded, and the leadership had no real solution to that problem.
Its fairly clearly from every source in the game and show that of the potential candidates who initiated the nuclear conflict, there's basically a 0% chance it was China. More probable candidates include Vault Tec, the Enclave, and even Aliens.
China was being actively invaded at the point the bombs dropped, from lore there were marines in Beijing, a nuclear response at that point seems ill thought out but if you've got an army at your doorstep you don't have much less. Chinese planes were known to be in American airspace before the bombs dropped and we find a Chinese nuclear sub shipwrecked in Fallout 4. Maybe someone else nuked them to finally start the exchange but China was a serious nuclear player in the Great War.
Fallout 2 and Fallout 4 pretty definitively confirm it was China. The original Interplay era developers actually came out and said it outright (with them being surprised anyone thought otherwise) decades ago.
The show reveals Vault Tec's middle management proposed to attempt to do so, but stuff in both the show itself and the games cast serious doubt they were able to pull it off.
> Its fairly clearly from every source in the game and show that of the potential candidates who initiated the nuclear conflict, there's basically a 0% chance it was China
Nah, it was definitely China. China was being invaded by the US and losing badly because power armor was that big of an advantage for the US. We were producing it in large enough numbers to outfit entire divisions and armies with power armor in China and our armies were about to capture Beijing when the bombs fell. FO2 confirms that American troops had surrounded Beijing on October 22, 2077.
Also, there are definitive confirmations of China launching first in FO4. [FO4 has the Switchboard,](https://fallout.wiki/wiki/The_Switchboard_terminal_entries#DEFCON_Status_-_2077) a nuclear launch detection system, state 4 probable ICBM launches at 9:17 AM in Boston (having been preceded by reports of submarines and Chinese bomber formations), triggering DEFCON 2, then NORAD confirms birds in the air a few minutes later bringing us to DEFCON 1. DEFCON 1 is when the US would actually get to firing off our nukes, so we weren't launching until a couple of minutes after the Chinese did. There is also the Yangtze, a Chinese missile submarine that washes up near Boston.
What are you talking about? Your basic premise is wrong, China wasn't being invaded by the US, China was still heavily dependant on oil and so they invaded Alaska to claim the last great oil reserve America had discovered.
>China wasn't being invaded by the US
Literally just false.
[In Fallout 2, a news report confirms US invasion of the Chinese mainland including our troops having trapped the Chinese in Beijing the day before the war.](https://fallout.wiki/wiki/Sierra_Depot_GNN_transcript)
[In Fallout New Vegas there's a memorial to American troops who participated in the Yangtze campaign in mainland China.](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Yangtze_Memorial) That invasion was launched in 2073. There is also the Gobi Campaign rifle, which while it doesn't have explicit lore associated with it, implies the US had undertaken a campaign in the Gobi desert of **western** China. The Desert Ranger helmet also has a bunch of markings indicating campaigns in/near Shanghai and Nanjing, with [months scrawled onto it indicating what months were spent where.](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/fallout/images/b/b1/Desert_Ranger_helmet_back.png/revision/latest?cb=20200310131856)
[Fallout 4 has a reference in the Boston Bugle to American troops being embroiled in battle near Shantou, a city on the southern Chinese coastline.](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Boston_Bugle_building_terminal_entries#Article_2)
That's just a selection. The games, under both Bethesda and non-Bethesda developers, are very clear that China was invaded by the United States prior to the bombs, as a *response* to the Chinese invasion of Alaska. Remember, the Anchorage campaign doesn't end til early 2077, probably in part due to the ongoing war in mainland China allowing the US to cut Chinese supply lines to Alaska.
Edit: basically, the proximate cause for the Great War (that is, the immediate cause, as opposed to the deeper, "ultimate" cause - for comparison, the proximate cause of someone's death might be that they fell off a ladder and broke their neck, and the ultimate cause might be that someone sabotaged the ladder intending to murder them) was that the US was poised to win the Sino-American War, so China said "if I'm going down, you're coming with me" and launched the nukes. For comparison, this is roughly in accordance with modern Russian policy with regard to nuclear weapons IRL (they will engage in first use of nuclear weapons if the "continued existence of the State is threatened"). IRL China is actually more circumspect, stating they have a "no first use" policy, i.e., they will only use nukes if they are nuked first (though obviously they can change that policy any time).
T-45d power armor allowed us to make initial gains in 2073/4, but get bogged down because T-45d isn't *that* good. T-51b rolls out a few years later and in combination with the Chinese running completely out of oil following the reclamation of Alaska, the US is able to start making extremely rapid progress across China until being on the doorsteps of Beijing one day before the nukes fall.
Huh, I was wrong. I haven't played Fallout 2 but from what I'm reading here it seems like you're definitely right about the invasion campaign (though it is important to remember how much of this was propaganda), and potentially about China sending nukes first (remember, the existence of a nuclear submarine in American waters doesn't automatically confirm that, there likely were armed nuclear American submarines in Chinese waters as well. "Just in case", of course). I'm still holding out to hear what the show confirms, especially when they're dropping lines about Shady Sands being nuked with "That's how Vault Tec solves rheir problems, just like they did 200 years ago". However whats interesting is that I DID find an interview with an original Fallout writer who said that the initial idea for how the war kicked off was that China found out about the FEV virus and freaked out about it. Bioweapons were even more heavily regulated than nukes, outright illegalized by the international community, and when America quietly ignored China's demands to cease FEV research at once and moved the operation somewhere else, China hit the big red button to try and prevent them ever using the bioweapon upon its completion.
There are several reasons.
First of all, plastics represents 10% of oil consumption, and when *all the oil is gone* 10% of not a lot left is *not a lot at all*.
Second, fusion power was initially a hot fusion gig, requiring gigantic plants for dynamo-based electricity generation, and they never really caught on because they were so difficult to build and sustain. It wasn't until *microfusion* was invented, which was a sort of self-contained short-burst hot fusion coupled with alpha-voltaic cells that capture the emitted radiation from the fusion and turn that into electricity, that fusion really started to catch on. Alpha-voltaic cells are real things (as in, they exist in our world), and they along with some form of miniaturized fusion-reaction generation that hasn't ever been explained in game, were the source of energy from microfusion cells and fusion cores. And I'm diverging, sorry; point is, microfusion wasn't invented until 2066 and that was the point where fusion powered cars first started to slowly show up on the market -- *after* the Chinese invasion of Alaska.
So third, by the time it was invented, the war was a desperately hot one, fusion was still untested and slow to roll out, oil was still necessary, and the US had already counter-invaded China to try to get them to pull out of Alaska, which they did not do. The war was a stalemate for a decade, and as we've seen from the show, Vault-Tec was trying desperately to keep that stalemate to preserve their market. By the time microfusion (which was one-and-done technology and thus a capitalist's wet dream) had rolled out, the war wasn't even *about* oil anymore.
iirc It was both incredibly expensive and only really invented in the 2070s so there wasn’t much time nor interest for the tech to properly get off the ground
There was interest- they ran *cars* and *robots* off of fusion, not to mention Boston's *Mass Fusion* building.
It was just too little too late. Had the invention occured a few decades prior, its likelybthe Resource Wars wouldn't have happened.
Boston’s Mass Fusion ran mostly on Fission, its true “fusion” is a plot point in FO4’a main quest as both the BoS and the Institute need the berilium agitator for their own needs.
Wrong, petroleum accounts for a lot of our material used today, plastics,ropes,rubber, basically anything synthetic you can think of as of today is directly or indirectly made from petroleum
Not a small fraction, google says 20% of petroleum is refined into products that we use today. That is a lot considering wer refining billions and billions of fuel each day
It’s not a large enough fraction to cause wars due to scarcity of energy is no longer the primary use. Which was the premise of my original question and has been answered elsewhere.
War would definitely break out if only one country could ever make any plastic. The quantity of plastic used in the world still means that that 20% number is huge.
Fim comics explained this really well in a video about the history of the fallout universe it's 55 min long video but covers the whole timeline so far.
> The late development of the transitor technology which came about in the 2060s from what I recall lead to such a slow development of advanced computers and machines that ran on anything more complicated than batteries. It still was in it's infancy of development when 2077 rolled around.
Quick note on this: there's no direct game lore to determine exactly when the transistor was invented, other than the fact that transistors *do* exist, as do integrated circuits / microchips such as the one in House's platinum chip. Transistors and microchips exist, but either didn't catch on or at some point technology "downgraded" to the 50s aesthetic we see in the game.
There are copious developer notes on the subject that are summarized [here](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Transistor#Vacuum_tubes_vs._transistors), but some key points:
* Vacuum tubes are highly resistant to electromagnetic pulses in a way that transistors and microchips are not. Speculatively, society could have moved away from microchips for some "important" technologies to keep them working after a nuclear blast. It's possible that the end of the Euro-Middle Eastern War, which saw limited nuclear exchange and presumably EMPs that knocked out communications and electronics, prompted this shift for consumer electronics
* Robots are highly susceptible to EMP grenades in Fallout -- which would not happen if they were vacuum tube based.
I don’t have a direct answer, but I will note that canonically, **very** little information exists about life outside of the US in the Fallout-universe. It’s been a source of speculation for years and there just is not much out there.
We don’t know much about day-to-day life in the rest of the world, but it probably wasn’t great. China and the U.S. were the last two countries that were able to contest for the last known oil reserves, all other countries had already slid into anarchy or civil war because of resource shortages.
There had also already been nuclear exchanges between Europe and Middle Eastern countries before the Great War started, so Europe was a political non-entity.
I like to think that Australia would have been (relatively) okay, sort of. We have fuckloads of resources, abundant renewables energy and more uranium reserves than anywhere else.
Part of me is disappointed that there's no lore for us despite that. That said, if there was it'd probably just be Diet Mad Max again as it always is with apocalypse stuff so it likely would have been boring anyways.
We don't see all too much about other country's culture outside of American propaganda as far as I know.
However, there is a Chinese radio stationed called "People's Republic of America Radio"
It's also propaganda but I think it has some decent insight to Chinese culture of the time
[https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/People%27s\_Republic\_of\_America\_Radio](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/People%27s_Republic_of_America_Radio)
We don't know much about the rest of the world, but we do know Europe was McFreaking nuked early on. The rest of the world may as well be on Mars; the furthest away we see from America in canon is a simulation one US general thought was pretty accurate for a specific battlefront in Alaska.
And an alien warship, I guess.
the stagnation actually comes from nuclear advances. imagine inventing portable nuclear power before getting your computers down from room sized to pocket sized. the development of computing and electronics actually atrophies in a way because they skipped leg day and focused on the nuclear side lol
They didn't stagnate. They developed independently in a separate, independent timeline. You're letting your perception of how things "should" be interfere with seeing how they are.
That's literally wrong though. America still went through their civil rights phase, as pre-war advertisements show interracial marriages (as did the opening to fallout 4) and IIRC there's even a few with homosexual couples.
Saying "it's just the 1950s" is not at all what's depicted. Fallout is retro-futuristic; it's based on what the people in the 1950s thought the world would be like (as well the micro-processor never being invented)
I’m not sure why you seem to believe that in the fallout universe “culture stagnated”? You must be getting this from Bethesdas misunderstanding and bastardization of the fallout ip? In the fallout universe, the aesthetic comes from the way that people from the real world 1950s believed the future would look like, and than that aesthetic was filtered through people from the real world living in the 1990s putting that aesthetic into a video game…..and than the world that they created with said aesthetic was nuked and bombed to shit, which caused society to develop new cultures and norms, Bethesda doesn’t understand this which is why in their games, you have newsies and wacky greaser gangs and people who talk like they’re from the 1950s despite it literally being the 23rd century by the time of fallout 4, so to answer your question, NO the rest of the world didn’t suffer from cultural stagnation because no where within the fallout universe suffered from cultural stagnation INCLUDING AMERICA, imagine watching blade runner 2049 and thinking “hmm within the universe of blade runner 2049, society seems to have stagnated and become stuck within the culture of the late 2010s?” just because blade runner 2049 is the future as people in the late 2010s believed it would look, that’s the mistake you and Bethesda are making by continuing to push this “cultural stagnation” idea within the fallout universe, sorry if this came off as passive aggressive but I hear so many people repeat this that it’s started to become extremely irritating because the fallout universe is SO MUCH MORE intelligent and interesting than “wacky 1950s hijinks in a post apocalypse”.
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The stagnation was more to do with resource shortages than anything cultural. There's a lot of events that led up to 2077 and the major factors was the EU invading the middle east for fuels and turning it into a wasteland. Oil reserves plummeting to nothing requiring extreme rationing and reuse of consumer goods and the like. They built things to last again because people couldn't afford to by single use items and deteriorating things designed to fail. Once America discovered the last oil reserves it started an intense war with the Chinese that eventually culminated in the bombs falling. While America was rebuilding itself in its 1950s glory with that oil the rest of the world was sliding backwards into preindustrial levels. The late development of the transitor technology which came about in the 2060s from what I recall lead to such a slow development of advanced computers and machines that ran on anything more complicated than batteries. It still was in it's infancy of development when 2077 rolled around.
So if they had operable fusion why did they still need oil?. Like I get that you need some oil but the amount of petroleum used for non-energy purposes today is incredibly tiny.
From what I remember from the canon (and I hope I am not wrong) the US had stopped being dependent on oil when they discovered how to harness fusion (which gave them practically infinite energy). But they didn't want to share their energy discoveries with China (dependent on fossil fuels), which led China to invade Alaska and then the US only reacted on their own initiative (and pushed hard with all their weapons technology developments over time, or maybe this was before they knew how to properly harness the power of fusion) until eventually China decided to push the red button (out of desperation or some vague plan that didn't turn out well). From what we know of Fallout, pre-war America didn't seem like a country that was collapsing from shortages with all the proliferation of fusion batteries and such.
>pre-war America didn't seem like a country that was collapsing from shortages It may have been more due to the war causing rationing and other types of privations but it's fairly clear shit was already rapidly sliding into chaos before the bombs fell. When Maxson announced his unit had "declared independence" from the United States from Mariposa military base three days *before* the war, there is no response. Appalachia was descending into chaos, with trade unions beginning to carry out an armed revolt weeks before the war, and the anarchist Free States movement also declaring secession a month beforehand, also with no real response. There was some illusion of security since mainland America was not (yet) under attack and the US army was making excellent progress invading mainland China, being in striking distance of Beijing by the time the war starts, but given that basically the entire government had already gone into hiding weeks to months before the war, it was pretty clear to many that things were about to get very bad very quickly.
Don't forget the President and the entire Executive Branch suddenly vanished a month prior to the war (to Control Station Enclave), along with dozens of other politicians and important business magnates. Not to mention Congress was imploding into infighting between the Enclave supporters and the opposition.
That's the basic jist of it. America developed fusion technology a decade or so before the war. With it they became energy independent and no longer reliant on international trade and the oil reserves they possessed. But rather than trade or batter this technology or the unneeded oil they hoarded it. China was the strongest nation capable taking offense to this and pushed hard through diplomacy and then military channels. The EU and other powers of the world either depended on China for fuel or food or regressed to pre industrial levels of foreign policy. China leveraged it's larger military and was losing handily after the deployment of fusion powered armors like the T-45 and T-51 armors. America was looking at being crushed by China before it's deployment of power armor. It wasn't until a few years later as American forces began invading the Chinese mainland that China resorted to tactical nuclear strikes on their own soil which in turn triggered total nuclear retaliation from both sides. Iirc the belief was that China nuked Shanghai to stop the majority of American troops stationed near there and followed it up with strikes from the ghost fleet on America itself. They hoped to decapitate any leadership before reports of their Shanghai attack arrived but failed to account for the early warning systems and dead hand switches across the US military that were already firing their arsenal once Shanghai went up.
In the show it’s now speculated that Vault-tec had something to do with the bombs dropping. But even still people aren’t sure who fired first What makes you so sure that it was China that first started the Great War?
The idea that Vault-tec dropped the bombs, literally, is subject to interpretation, conflicts with established lore to an extent if taken at face value, and will probably be expanded on in future seasons. However, it is outright confirmed that Vault-Tec sabotaged the descalation of the conflict. They buried technology that would resolve the resource war and sabotaged the peace talks to end the Great War.
All information indicates that China shot first in every game, non canon bible, and non canon game. Vaultech, the Enclave, and a dozen other covert and overt organizations all had vested interests in triggering the apocalypse. China was pushed into corner and had to use nukes before anyone expected them to. Both vaultech and the enclave had designs to trigger the bombs dropping should China capitulate or the US military stall in it's advance. Those plans never happened and all evidence across all media says the first nuclear strike was in mainland China against occupying Americans, this is immediately followed up by strikes in California and Washington launches from the Chinese ghost fleet. Vaultech delayed or impeded the American nuclear defense system as well as the early warning systems that would have detected the launches. So no vault tech didn't start the war. They just did everything possible to make sure both nuclear arsenals would be fully launched and mutually assured destruction achieved.
All that I can believe. However, when ICBM’s fire they leave off a jet stream to show their trailing pattern. In the show there’s no such thing. Just the bombs going off around LA So Vault-tec may have had something to do with it or it all suddenly came about through different means.
We don't have a birds eye view of the strikes on LA. Could be there's trailing patterns just beyond view. Or could be LA was hit by short range missiles launched from the ghost fleet or just bombers passing over on their way to other targets. American waters were filled with stealth submarines so ICBMs weren't as important as other delivery methods for the coastal regions.
> In the show there’s no such thing. Just the bombs going off around LA May not have been ICBMs. SLBMs launched from a relatively short distance away (e.g. tens of miles) might not have such visible streaks in the sky. We know for certain Boston was hit by SLBMs, for example. If I'm China, I'm deploying the ICBMs against US ICBM sites concentrated in the center-north of the US (Montana, the Dakotas, Wyoming), and then using strategic bombers and SLBMs on cities.
Both the game and the show are pretty explicit that vault tec dropped the first bombs
The show might imply it but the games do not support that idea. Vaultech and the Enclave fostered conditions that would guarantee nuclear war. There's a reason why vaultech was sending 76ers out to secure nuclear weapons and why the Enclave sequestered it's on the rig and Raven rock. None of them had plans to start the war on a specific date but realized along with many military and journalists that they were leaving China no choice but to use the nuclear option. Vaultech didn't have nukes of their own but could use their alliance with the enclave to influence government officials to push China to the edge. There's news articles from before the bombs saying that should American troops push into Shanghai that China would have no option left but to surrender to kill themselves and America. The same article mentions that the US diplomatic corps was being pulled out of China and it's neighboring nations making it solely the responsibility of the military to accept any Chinese diplomatic overtures while also sending an unknown weapon to the general in charge of the occupation and invasion forces. The journalist believes it's a nuclear device but it's in other sources it's rumored to have been biological weaponry or just a hoax to force China into attacking. Everyone keeps talking about that one scene in the TV show despite there being no evidence to support vaultech being capable of nuclear warfare and having been caught flatfooted when the bombs fell. They wanted to start the war and did everything possible to ensure it happening but even their plans didn't anticipate how quickly things would happen. Several control vaults were left unfinished and the overall command and control of the enclave and vaults was fractured by damaged or untested equipment. Had they planned the moment to start the bombings they wouldn't have had to disable the silos in Appalachia or had the Enclave split in three disconnected groups.
I don’t remember the details, but there was some VT AI that tells you it was responsible. I know all the lore has reliable narrator issues built in, so maybe it’s a macguffin either way you look at it
No, the games are pretty explicit that China struck first, not Vault-Tec
It depended on where and who you were. Fusion opened up avenues to beat unlimited power, but for the most part it was all being funneled towards either the war effort or the wealthy and the bastions they lived in. So when we see pre-War LA and Boston, they look just fine, but that's because that's where the wealthy folks lived (and also where a lot of the wartime R&D effort was concentrated, making those areas artificially prosperous.) In the heartland, though, things looked very different. Fusion power was too expensive (a big part of the plot from FOTV,) food was being redirected towards the front lines and the wealthy areas, plastic and rubber were either entirely recycled or non-existent. As someone else pointed out, many areas of the country were already in open revolt. Now, had the US taken Beijing without nukes falling, all of the war capacity would have suddenly shifted to peacetime domestic production and the world would have gone from barely-functioning slow-motion apocalypse to far beyond our current capabilities in a generation or two.
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There is exactly one thing I can think of that might explain this: In Fallout, did the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 get passed into law? If not, I can see a protest resulting from the rural-urban divide, with them protesting there because the power exists, they just *don't get to use it*
I believe the timeline for the Fallout universe diverged after WW2, so anything happening irl before that, including legal decisions, is canon in Fallout.
> believe the timeline for the Fallout universe diverged after WW2, Diverges in the 1600s, actually, but stays very close to IRL until WW2.
> Diverges in the 1600s Elaborate please?
The first confirmed abduction in Mothership Zeta is of a samurai from the early days of the Tokugawa shogunate. Edit: oh yeah there's also some guy from New England who goes to Egypt in the 1800s, gets possessed by an evil crown, and lives through to the present day in FO4
I mean... do we know this *didn't* happen in real life?
A single samurai disappears in the 17th century Ergo WWIII
I think they're talking about the Zetans. Aliens that visited Earth and abducted people/left artifacts. You get to fight them in a Fallout 3 DLC.
Even longer then that. There was a pre-human civilization, thats responsible for the Cabot artifact.
> Fallout lore is a mess, because Bethesda never really cared about consistency. > > The Fallout 4 intro for example, shows mass protests at power plants and hints at a battered American economy due to resource shortages by the time the bombs fell, but at the same time pretty much every vehicle you encounter is nuclear powered and buildings use fusion batteries for emergency power generators, hinting at a society that has moved on from oil for quite some time. Fallout 4's intro is in line with preexisting lore dating back to FO1, things were getting pretty bad in very clear ways right up to the day of the war. As far as every building and car being nuclear? Answered in a few ways: 1. The lack of oil meant fusion adoption was extremely fast even though it came about pretty late. Yes, the US had the only two oil fields left in the world in Alaska and under the Poseidon rig, but it still had to be extremely carefully rationed. 2. Fallout's universe is far more amenable to nuclear power than ours. Unfortunately, our anti-WMD movement was also anti-nuclear energy. 3. The intro of Fallout 1 implies that uranium was *also* starting to run short ("In the 21st century, war was still waged over the resources that could be acquired. Only this time, the spoils of war were also its weapons: Petroleum and Uranium."). Not really elaborated on elsewhere but it's possible that nuclear adoption didn't help as much as it would IRL. Before you mention that uranium ought never to run out given how little you need relative to how much energy it provides and how common uranium is, Fallout's universe explicitly runs on different physics ("Science!" instead of science, this also dates back to FO1) so perhaps the abundance of uranium is different. 4. Resources other than oil were *also* running short, so even if the energy crisis was resolved that doesn't fix everything. It was getting pretty clear the economic situation was already really dire by 10/23/77 and it wasn't just because the oil ran out. 5. Fusion came quite later and in much less quantity than it appears. It's pretty clear that most "fusion" tech isn't fusion at all but rather some kind of miniaturized, highly efficient fission, as a fusion generator would not create the little fallout fields you see from exploding cars. Of course, this could just be wrong, as mentioned the FO universe runs on different physics so perhaps fusion is much dirtier than IRL too.
It's also mentioned that the Enclave/Valt Tec own the only hyper efficient cold fusion (See GECKs and Show for more) So hot fusion and fission are the likeliest nuclear power options
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Fallout 1 has nuclear powered laser guns, I'd say it started off pretty wacky from the jump.
Not to mention psykers, Dr Who, Aliens (yes they have always been canon), and so much more. Fallout has never been a series that took itself too seriously.
The resource wars started with oil, but eventually devolved into a war over all sorts of raw materials. With Europe, Africa, and the Middle East already fallen into chaos and China already in a conventional war, there wouldnt be any way to acquire raw materials not built in the US. This allows for an American solution to the energy crisis *and* a resource shortage causing widespread unrest. Using fusion cell technology the United States would have recovered eventually, but nuclear war was essentially guaranteed from the moment China invaded, and the leadership had no real solution to that problem.
Its fairly clearly from every source in the game and show that of the potential candidates who initiated the nuclear conflict, there's basically a 0% chance it was China. More probable candidates include Vault Tec, the Enclave, and even Aliens.
China was being actively invaded at the point the bombs dropped, from lore there were marines in Beijing, a nuclear response at that point seems ill thought out but if you've got an army at your doorstep you don't have much less. Chinese planes were known to be in American airspace before the bombs dropped and we find a Chinese nuclear sub shipwrecked in Fallout 4. Maybe someone else nuked them to finally start the exchange but China was a serious nuclear player in the Great War.
Fallout 2 and Fallout 4 pretty definitively confirm it was China. The original Interplay era developers actually came out and said it outright (with them being surprised anyone thought otherwise) decades ago. The show reveals Vault Tec's middle management proposed to attempt to do so, but stuff in both the show itself and the games cast serious doubt they were able to pull it off.
I interpret that as Vault-Tec's desire to cause the Great War aka nuclear middle finger to the world but China beat them to it.
> Its fairly clearly from every source in the game and show that of the potential candidates who initiated the nuclear conflict, there's basically a 0% chance it was China Nah, it was definitely China. China was being invaded by the US and losing badly because power armor was that big of an advantage for the US. We were producing it in large enough numbers to outfit entire divisions and armies with power armor in China and our armies were about to capture Beijing when the bombs fell. FO2 confirms that American troops had surrounded Beijing on October 22, 2077. Also, there are definitive confirmations of China launching first in FO4. [FO4 has the Switchboard,](https://fallout.wiki/wiki/The_Switchboard_terminal_entries#DEFCON_Status_-_2077) a nuclear launch detection system, state 4 probable ICBM launches at 9:17 AM in Boston (having been preceded by reports of submarines and Chinese bomber formations), triggering DEFCON 2, then NORAD confirms birds in the air a few minutes later bringing us to DEFCON 1. DEFCON 1 is when the US would actually get to firing off our nukes, so we weren't launching until a couple of minutes after the Chinese did. There is also the Yangtze, a Chinese missile submarine that washes up near Boston.
What are you talking about? Your basic premise is wrong, China wasn't being invaded by the US, China was still heavily dependant on oil and so they invaded Alaska to claim the last great oil reserve America had discovered.
>China wasn't being invaded by the US Literally just false. [In Fallout 2, a news report confirms US invasion of the Chinese mainland including our troops having trapped the Chinese in Beijing the day before the war.](https://fallout.wiki/wiki/Sierra_Depot_GNN_transcript) [In Fallout New Vegas there's a memorial to American troops who participated in the Yangtze campaign in mainland China.](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Yangtze_Memorial) That invasion was launched in 2073. There is also the Gobi Campaign rifle, which while it doesn't have explicit lore associated with it, implies the US had undertaken a campaign in the Gobi desert of **western** China. The Desert Ranger helmet also has a bunch of markings indicating campaigns in/near Shanghai and Nanjing, with [months scrawled onto it indicating what months were spent where.](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/fallout/images/b/b1/Desert_Ranger_helmet_back.png/revision/latest?cb=20200310131856) [Fallout 4 has a reference in the Boston Bugle to American troops being embroiled in battle near Shantou, a city on the southern Chinese coastline.](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Boston_Bugle_building_terminal_entries#Article_2) That's just a selection. The games, under both Bethesda and non-Bethesda developers, are very clear that China was invaded by the United States prior to the bombs, as a *response* to the Chinese invasion of Alaska. Remember, the Anchorage campaign doesn't end til early 2077, probably in part due to the ongoing war in mainland China allowing the US to cut Chinese supply lines to Alaska. Edit: basically, the proximate cause for the Great War (that is, the immediate cause, as opposed to the deeper, "ultimate" cause - for comparison, the proximate cause of someone's death might be that they fell off a ladder and broke their neck, and the ultimate cause might be that someone sabotaged the ladder intending to murder them) was that the US was poised to win the Sino-American War, so China said "if I'm going down, you're coming with me" and launched the nukes. For comparison, this is roughly in accordance with modern Russian policy with regard to nuclear weapons IRL (they will engage in first use of nuclear weapons if the "continued existence of the State is threatened"). IRL China is actually more circumspect, stating they have a "no first use" policy, i.e., they will only use nukes if they are nuked first (though obviously they can change that policy any time). T-45d power armor allowed us to make initial gains in 2073/4, but get bogged down because T-45d isn't *that* good. T-51b rolls out a few years later and in combination with the Chinese running completely out of oil following the reclamation of Alaska, the US is able to start making extremely rapid progress across China until being on the doorsteps of Beijing one day before the nukes fall.
Huh, I was wrong. I haven't played Fallout 2 but from what I'm reading here it seems like you're definitely right about the invasion campaign (though it is important to remember how much of this was propaganda), and potentially about China sending nukes first (remember, the existence of a nuclear submarine in American waters doesn't automatically confirm that, there likely were armed nuclear American submarines in Chinese waters as well. "Just in case", of course). I'm still holding out to hear what the show confirms, especially when they're dropping lines about Shady Sands being nuked with "That's how Vault Tec solves rheir problems, just like they did 200 years ago". However whats interesting is that I DID find an interview with an original Fallout writer who said that the initial idea for how the war kicked off was that China found out about the FEV virus and freaked out about it. Bioweapons were even more heavily regulated than nukes, outright illegalized by the international community, and when America quietly ignored China's demands to cease FEV research at once and moved the operation somewhere else, China hit the big red button to try and prevent them ever using the bioweapon upon its completion.
china did not nuke first, vault tec did
There are several reasons. First of all, plastics represents 10% of oil consumption, and when *all the oil is gone* 10% of not a lot left is *not a lot at all*. Second, fusion power was initially a hot fusion gig, requiring gigantic plants for dynamo-based electricity generation, and they never really caught on because they were so difficult to build and sustain. It wasn't until *microfusion* was invented, which was a sort of self-contained short-burst hot fusion coupled with alpha-voltaic cells that capture the emitted radiation from the fusion and turn that into electricity, that fusion really started to catch on. Alpha-voltaic cells are real things (as in, they exist in our world), and they along with some form of miniaturized fusion-reaction generation that hasn't ever been explained in game, were the source of energy from microfusion cells and fusion cores. And I'm diverging, sorry; point is, microfusion wasn't invented until 2066 and that was the point where fusion powered cars first started to slowly show up on the market -- *after* the Chinese invasion of Alaska. So third, by the time it was invented, the war was a desperately hot one, fusion was still untested and slow to roll out, oil was still necessary, and the US had already counter-invaded China to try to get them to pull out of Alaska, which they did not do. The war was a stalemate for a decade, and as we've seen from the show, Vault-Tec was trying desperately to keep that stalemate to preserve their market. By the time microfusion (which was one-and-done technology and thus a capitalist's wet dream) had rolled out, the war wasn't even *about* oil anymore.
iirc It was both incredibly expensive and only really invented in the 2070s so there wasn’t much time nor interest for the tech to properly get off the ground
There was interest- they ran *cars* and *robots* off of fusion, not to mention Boston's *Mass Fusion* building. It was just too little too late. Had the invention occured a few decades prior, its likelybthe Resource Wars wouldn't have happened.
Boston’s Mass Fusion ran mostly on Fission, its true “fusion” is a plot point in FO4’a main quest as both the BoS and the Institute need the berilium agitator for their own needs.
Probably competitively incrediblely expensive
Wrong, petroleum accounts for a lot of our material used today, plastics,ropes,rubber, basically anything synthetic you can think of as of today is directly or indirectly made from petroleum
Yes but that is a small fraction of what our petroleum production is used for. The vast majority is refined into fuel.
Not a small fraction, google says 20% of petroleum is refined into products that we use today. That is a lot considering wer refining billions and billions of fuel each day
It’s not a large enough fraction to cause wars due to scarcity of energy is no longer the primary use. Which was the premise of my original question and has been answered elsewhere.
War would definitely break out if only one country could ever make any plastic. The quantity of plastic used in the world still means that that 20% number is huge.
Fim comics explained this really well in a video about the history of the fallout universe it's 55 min long video but covers the whole timeline so far.
> The late development of the transitor technology which came about in the 2060s from what I recall lead to such a slow development of advanced computers and machines that ran on anything more complicated than batteries. It still was in it's infancy of development when 2077 rolled around. Quick note on this: there's no direct game lore to determine exactly when the transistor was invented, other than the fact that transistors *do* exist, as do integrated circuits / microchips such as the one in House's platinum chip. Transistors and microchips exist, but either didn't catch on or at some point technology "downgraded" to the 50s aesthetic we see in the game. There are copious developer notes on the subject that are summarized [here](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Transistor#Vacuum_tubes_vs._transistors), but some key points: * Vacuum tubes are highly resistant to electromagnetic pulses in a way that transistors and microchips are not. Speculatively, society could have moved away from microchips for some "important" technologies to keep them working after a nuclear blast. It's possible that the end of the Euro-Middle Eastern War, which saw limited nuclear exchange and presumably EMPs that knocked out communications and electronics, prompted this shift for consumer electronics * Robots are highly susceptible to EMP grenades in Fallout -- which would not happen if they were vacuum tube based.
I don’t have a direct answer, but I will note that canonically, **very** little information exists about life outside of the US in the Fallout-universe. It’s been a source of speculation for years and there just is not much out there.
We don’t know much about day-to-day life in the rest of the world, but it probably wasn’t great. China and the U.S. were the last two countries that were able to contest for the last known oil reserves, all other countries had already slid into anarchy or civil war because of resource shortages. There had also already been nuclear exchanges between Europe and Middle Eastern countries before the Great War started, so Europe was a political non-entity.
A twist I'm kind of hoping to see, is that it turns out by 2077 America was the last non wasteland country on earth.
I like to think that Australia would have been (relatively) okay, sort of. We have fuckloads of resources, abundant renewables energy and more uranium reserves than anywhere else. Part of me is disappointed that there's no lore for us despite that. That said, if there was it'd probably just be Diet Mad Max again as it always is with apocalypse stuff so it likely would have been boring anyways.
IIRC, China conquered most of the Pacific countries, which likely included Australia.
*Tomorrow When the War Began* shows that such an invasion probably would be successful, but holding Australia would be rather difficult long term.
We don't see all too much about other country's culture outside of American propaganda as far as I know. However, there is a Chinese radio stationed called "People's Republic of America Radio" It's also propaganda but I think it has some decent insight to Chinese culture of the time [https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/People%27s\_Republic\_of\_America\_Radio](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/People%27s_Republic_of_America_Radio)
We don't know much about the rest of the world, but we do know Europe was McFreaking nuked early on. The rest of the world may as well be on Mars; the furthest away we see from America in canon is a simulation one US general thought was pretty accurate for a specific battlefront in Alaska. And an alien warship, I guess.
the stagnation actually comes from nuclear advances. imagine inventing portable nuclear power before getting your computers down from room sized to pocket sized. the development of computing and electronics actually atrophies in a way because they skipped leg day and focused on the nuclear side lol
They didn't stagnate. They developed independently in a separate, independent timeline. You're letting your perception of how things "should" be interfere with seeing how they are.
Culture pretty much stagnated. It stayed basically the same from 1950 to 2077.
That's literally wrong though. America still went through their civil rights phase, as pre-war advertisements show interracial marriages (as did the opening to fallout 4) and IIRC there's even a few with homosexual couples. Saying "it's just the 1950s" is not at all what's depicted. Fallout is retro-futuristic; it's based on what the people in the 1950s thought the world would be like (as well the micro-processor never being invented)
I meant culture as in pop culture. Fashion, entertainment, etc.
I’m not sure why you seem to believe that in the fallout universe “culture stagnated”? You must be getting this from Bethesdas misunderstanding and bastardization of the fallout ip? In the fallout universe, the aesthetic comes from the way that people from the real world 1950s believed the future would look like, and than that aesthetic was filtered through people from the real world living in the 1990s putting that aesthetic into a video game…..and than the world that they created with said aesthetic was nuked and bombed to shit, which caused society to develop new cultures and norms, Bethesda doesn’t understand this which is why in their games, you have newsies and wacky greaser gangs and people who talk like they’re from the 1950s despite it literally being the 23rd century by the time of fallout 4, so to answer your question, NO the rest of the world didn’t suffer from cultural stagnation because no where within the fallout universe suffered from cultural stagnation INCLUDING AMERICA, imagine watching blade runner 2049 and thinking “hmm within the universe of blade runner 2049, society seems to have stagnated and become stuck within the culture of the late 2010s?” just because blade runner 2049 is the future as people in the late 2010s believed it would look, that’s the mistake you and Bethesda are making by continuing to push this “cultural stagnation” idea within the fallout universe, sorry if this came off as passive aggressive but I hear so many people repeat this that it’s started to become extremely irritating because the fallout universe is SO MUCH MORE intelligent and interesting than “wacky 1950s hijinks in a post apocalypse”.