Fallout 3, per se? Probably not. After all, this is an alternate universe which runs on the laws of SCIENCE!, not 'science' as we understand it.

On the other hand, could there ever be worldwide nuclear Armageddon, followed by the collapse of civilization as we know it?
Absolutely.

I'm going to go with this statement.

Even if a two country war was to happen, and they blew each other to pieces with nukes, thanks yo the amount of dipolmacy in the world today, it would get other countries also involved, making it alot bigger then just the two that started it.

However, if say USA was nuked to nothingness, the fallout in the atmoshere would most likely spread over a huge area, across oceans and even to europe and south america, same with russia, all depending on wind and weather. A winter like that would easily bring econemies to thier knees as food would run out as crops you fail to ggrow. There would be a good chance the fallout would be dangerous to people's health, to livestock and infect water supplies.

We saw what happened recently with the global credit crisis, some USA banks went bankrupt and suddenly the whole world felt it, imagine the effect if the USA, or russia, or at worst china was to shut down. Manufactoring would be limited and it would effect every nation on the world, even if they escape the fallout.


As people have said, leaders dont have thier fingers on their nume buttons anymore, but I dont think it would take much for the doomsday clock to be restarted. Although exsaggerated results and speedy actions, modern warfare 2 shows how easily if would be to start off a fight between two countires....and if they are nuclear armed and wont communicate with each other, it is not unliked that we will sit on the brink of destruction again.

Thats my opinion though, and Im only 17, pick it apart and correct me as you please.

Famine, enviromental collapse, disease, inhuman warfare has happened / is happening in Africa all the time.
Actualy is going on everywhere in some extent but I think Africa is worst of.
What Charles Taylor did to young boys so they would become his new soldiers... horror plain horror.
That said plenty of African countries are oing ok if not great.

OK! OK! Picture this, Fallout, but without the Vaults. And that's kinda what you're looking at.

Enjoy!

and if it did happen in reality, not every city, town and group of houses and nation on earth would be nuked like they seemed to be in Fallout, just the participant nations.

Man, everyone else can die of cancer, but I'm taking my bullet to the brain, and if that fails, jumping off a really tall building. I don't want to bleed out of my rectum before the end.

Could a nuclear war happen?: I think yes. The only thing that has stopped it from happening is that noone who has been in charge of launching nuclear weapons has had both hatred for every single entity, being, and object on earth (rocks, plants, humans, non-human animals, etc.) and have a lack of self preservation and/or pure and complete hatred for themself.

I also think it may be possible to have mutant animals running around aswell. I saw some show on nuclear warfare or rats, one of the two that said when people were doing nuclear testing somewhere the rats knew way ahead of time and burrowed themselves really, really far underground and waited until it was safe to come up. I am not sure if that is completely true but rats are damn smart and i would not be surprised. Cockroaches are supposedly resistant to radiation so they might survive. Some humans would probably survive, probably by doing what the rats would do except with shiny metal walls. Other creatures might live too. Maybe humans make a "noah's ark" kind of thing and keep them underground thinking they can rebuild earth. Or maybe the other non-human animals would have some kind of way to survive by themselves like roaches and rats. Ants maybe?

i bet it could happen but im pretty sure that if it did happen the only thing that would survive would be the roach, you just cant kill those things

also if it did happen, the only way we would be able to survive would to be underground and wait a few hundred years for the dust clouds that where kicked up by the bombs to fall back down to the crust, then wait another few hundred years just for good measure so hopefully some of the radiation would be blown into space from solar winds. if we were lucky we earth wouldnt turn into another "Venus"

Well, considering the Cold War was real and did "happen", everyone had nukes pointed at everyone else.. it could have happened. Also, there's still tons of nukes in Russia that are pretty much just sitting there rotting. The US has plenty of nukes ready to go. I think it's more likely than people think.

Sorry for the late reply.

I read it in a Nat. Geo. Magazine regarding Chernobyl. The article itself, I think was either about an annerversary of the Chernobyl Disaster, or as an example as to what will happen if humans were gone. Basically, it was a sentance saying "Yep, we found compounds in the soil created by radiation from Chernobyl that offers some resistance to radiation damage." I'm not sure the exact date of the issue, but it was within the past 3 years.

This isn't so far-fetched actually, viral mutation works much the same way. After the disaster the radiation would kill almost everything in the soil nearby - except for those extremely rare ones that had an immunity to radiation. After a time and many cell-splits, what your left with is a radiation-resistant bacterium. Viruses adapt in exactly the same way to anti-biotics designed to kill them. The drugs kill 99.999% of the bugs, and the few left that are immune grow and divide into a new species of the bug.

What would kill almost all human life on earth is not radiation - but rather famine and disease. With any such war the global trade system would break-down, which would doom nearly most nations to a slow, agonizing death. I do think there would be bands of human survivors in the end, but they would be a very small population most likely living in tribes or clans for survival and protection. In place of the super-mutants and ghouls, we would have other humans instead - who would likely be far nastier than the mutants and ghouls could ever be.

Miax

pespective- The impact that caused the Chicxulub crater, likely a leading cause of the dinos extinction, is estimated at 100million megatons. thats got to hundreds of times the destructive power of all the nukes in the world combined- so at best, maybe we could do just as good a job. But I doubt it. a big reason for the extinctions is the sunlight being blocked for like a year, and that would have caused the extinctions in the ocean. the plankton dies, in turn everything else does.
The oceans, I doubt would care about a nuke war.

If all the nuke weapons in the world were detonated right now. Perhaps in about 100 years most areas would probably would look normal, fauna and floral doing its thing etc.

I speculate it wouldn't be as bad as people think.

more perspective- Apparently, today, radiation levels on Bikini are actually nonharmfull. just eating the coconuts for extend periods.....
They dropped over 20 bombs in that area. its like pretty small place. like maybe the size of average city.

Now there are a lot of nukes in the world. To decimate the US, might take several thousand bombs. It's a massive area after all. There are enough to do this certainly. but most of the world, in terms of actual dextruction, would be spared. Economic and environmental disaster would cripple many nations, and lead to millions dying. And millions... right now die all the time from wars.

Fallout, would be the larger problem. after the intial fallout danger levels resided, a few weeks, Nothing would be edible really. It would be contaminated. At this point, I can hardly speculate further about the senario, too many varibles. but the intial destruction and what not wouldn't extintion level disaster.

Compared to an asteroid impact, the nuclear arsenal is tiny, but the radiation would screw things up but good. That garbage would be in the atmosphere and oceans a long time and be evaporated and condensed continuously through precipitation and wind cycles. So as if the background radiation and Lanthanides wouldn't make the Earth a glowing Hell, think about the almost never-ending radioactive dust, rain, and snowstorms. Try adding the dirty rain/snow mechanic I've heard about to your PC copy of FO3 and you'll know what fission-salted Hell really is. If anything, the best-case scenario for nuke-survival would be akin to "Threads" by the BBC or perhaps Arthur Miller's "A Canticle for Liebowitz".

But there nukes are much less powerful. In terms of actual power, are nuclear arsenals are ruffly the same, or used to be. Plus, are nukes are better maintained.




That's because everyone in the league of nations decided to act like cowards and allow Germany to do what ever the hell they wanted, it has nothing to do with humanity loving war. I disagree with the statement: "All humans want to wage war, it's natural." In history, it's shown that all wars are started by mad-men, or men who hope to gain something. I believe a small nuclear exchange is possible, but unlikely. A global nuke war is almost impossible, though.

Could Fallout 3 happen? Super Mutant Behemoths, mini mushroom-clouds, radiatet water not beeing subject to natural filtration, ghouls looking like they do and beeing healthy... -not really!

Well, I think that you should - if by some unlikely chance you didn't - watch "On the Beach" movie(well I watched the 2000 one). I think If it would happen, it would turn out pretty much like there. (if it was a full-out nuclear exchange, that is).

I agree that we don't wage war because we thrive on it, or love it. There are exceptions, but most humans shy away from conflict. Wars are waged over three things: greed, disagreement and hate. By our very nature we do tend to be greedy, and have little tolerance for people who disagree with us. This leads to wars, and then to long lasting wounds which lead to future wars if not healed. Some of the folks in history who instigated wars were indeed madmen, but even they went to war over greed, belief or grudges stemmed from previous wrongs committed in past wars.

A war like the one that lead to the holocaust in Fallout is actually very possible since it was caused by a combination of greed and disagreement based on what we know from the Fallout and Fallout 2 introductions. The world was running low on resources, and every nation thought they were more entitled to the last resources than anyone else. Then came the disagreements over who should be entitled to what; the final nail in the coffin was when nations became paranoid because they feared that the nation who got the majority of the last resources would control the world. Long time grudges would have reemerged during this process as well since the resource war (which could also be called World War III) was on a global scale.

If we did have a resource war in real life then I highly doubt it would lead to nuclear bombardment. Most countries wouldn't risk the consequences of launching all of their nukes even if they were losing the war, and would opt to surrender. Fallout's scenario has a very pessimistic and unlikely end result, but that's because it merely served as a setup for the post apocalyptic setting of the series.

Actually, I view the nuclear exchange as depicted in FO would be very likely, if there was a Resource War, and nations decided to fight over what was left rather than to develop other methods.

If you've got nothing to lose, then there's no reason for you to NOT fire off all your nukes and ahnilate your enemy. If they all hit before they can fire back, hey you've won. If not... well, it's not like you'd survive for long anyway.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCpjgl2baLs

^possible how it all happened (and will happen) just thought id contribute to the discussion :3

This is a great angle. Actually however, the Chicxulub impact was far more deadly than the nukes would be - not only because of the huge size of the comet/asteroid but mostly because the impact angle was oblique at about 30 degrees (so the impacter hit on a sharp angle and not straight down). This meant that the bulk of the energy from the impact went into the atmosphere and not into the ground as most impaters do. As a result of that, many millions of tons of rock and molten ejecta were blasted north and literally scorched all of the present US and Canada just about. It was for this reason, the unique nature of the blast, that cause the extinction of the dinosaurs (and there is now plenty of verified evident, its no longer a question).

The effects of nuclear war - even en-mass - would be different but equally devistating to the world. Chiczulub produced no radiation, but the huge atmospheric blast caused a world-wide fire (all forests, literally). Nuclear bombs wouldn't do that, they would annhilate totally the areas around the impact - but it wouldn't cause a world-wide firestorm unless bombs landed in every single forest - BUT the fallout would most definitely be world-wide, the sky would definitely darken - but not for as long as Chiczulub did (primarily because sulfer dioxide can stay aloft for years, but fallout wont). The nuclear winter would be quite short compared to the Chiczulub winter as a result. This difference is quite huge, as with Chiczulub the winter lasted long-enough to kill off about 70% of life in the Ocean (only the deep-sea creatures survived). A nuclear war would not do that, and the ocean would still have Alot more life in it than post-Chiczulub.

I think the biggest difference between them is that with Chiczulub - no place on earth was safe from being roasted alive. With Fallout, no place on earth would be safe from being irradiated to death. To me that means lots of ghouls and mutated life, but still lots of life around. With Chiczulub, the majority of life on earth perished. To me it makes alot of the "theme" around Fallout seem plausable. If a game were made in the post-Chiczulub time, there wouldn't be much to do or see.

Again great angle, love the anology!

Miax

If the Taliban were to ever 'stumble' upon some nuclear weapons then we're all screwed.

also after studing chernoble wild life it turns out that after a 1 or 3 genrations radiation is fairly intergratted with the animal and has no mutative or negative effects, but the frist generation did get sick. but after their kids were fine and dandy and so was the plant life

I 100% agree with this - and for that matter, why I think the wasteland should be quite green and as lush as Oblivion's.

Funny thing is that as soon as mankind stops wrecking the world with industrialization, the earth will immediately start to reclaim the land. The wasteland 200+ years after the war would be in fact be far greener and nicer than the one we have today - as nothing would be stopping the halt of plant growth.

So the folks who modded the green worlds and full trees back actually got it right, where in this aspect, Beth did not. Still, I think the choice of making the wasteland "look" devistated with no life definitely added to the immersion of a post-apocolyptic world - just one about 5-10 years after the war, not 200+.

nah, they will use it all in the US.

of course you will be screwed if you live there.