Nope. On October 23, 2077 every country that had nukes fired them at their respective enemies. Other conflicts just weren't explored in detail because they weren't relevant to the Fallout games to date. And we don't know if nukes were actually being used in the Resource Wars between Europe and the Middle East.



The FO1 and 2 intros are pretty clear in that all of the civlized world was nuked, and most of humanity was killed. As are the developers. There is no reason not to believe it to be true.

Jesse Heinig, one of the FO1 developers:



Tim Cain, asked about Europe, also said that he believes it to be nuked. And recently Emil Pagliarulo said that England is even more messed up than the US.

Hmm, I'll reiterate. And I agree that it makes no sense - that's the point! There is nothing logical about nuclear war whatsoever.

With that said; We don't know who launched the nukes first, I'll say the United States this time.

United States first strike against Chinese targets. This commits the U.S. to total nuclear war. They can expect a return strike from China. Therefore, the most logical option is to attack Chinese allies, sympathisers, those who may turn against the U.S. for launching the strike (of whom there would be many). Think about it; the last thing you want after you've been nuked is a load of unscathed countries left who hate you.
We can assume this did not destroy China, as it was able to make a second strike against the U.S. Using the same logic, but also with a "nothing left to lose" mentality, U.S. interests and allies are struck against. Might as well, rather than leaving them to rebuild the world whilst China lays in rubble.
Edit: Of course, every other nuclear nation on Earth would be thinking the same thing, once they realise that there is no turning back. Old scores settled, targets wiped out in a vain hope of securing the nation's future supremacy, all add to the nuclear melange.


We have no evidence to the contrary. We have evidence that the entire world was 'bathed in fire'. This is the simplest explanation for what happened to the U.K., and indeed the rest of the world (with a few exceptions), and therefore the most probable.

The resource wars would have left Europe a mess, yes. The Great War would have left it in just as bad a shape as the U.S.

I'm still not getting where this Empire stuff is coming from. It wouldn't be relevant even if it was true. As it stands in the Fallout timeline, you might as well argue that France got off better because of the conquests of Napoleon. Long gone before Fallout divergence! As was the Empire.

Actually, unlike Napoleon's conquests, the British Empire dissolved after the divergence, not before. It's quite possible that in the Fallout world, Britain kept some of the colonies it lost in ours.

Nope. http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Divergence of the timelines occurred after WWII (the exact dates are subject to debate, but that fact is undisputed). One of the key factors in the dissolution of the Empire (which, by the mid twentieth century was a shadow of it's former glory, making way for the new superpowers - the U.S. and U.S.S.R.) is the fact that the country was bankrupt after two expensive bloody wars. These still occur in Fallout history. There's no reason to assume the Empire 'got better' given that WWI and WWII still happen, with no mitigating factors on other side.

Yes, but maybe instead of abandoning the empire, Britain decided to even more brutally exploit its colonies? Or maybe they lost them, but decided to conquer them again later, when they had the capacity to? The US in the Fallout world was even more militaristic than in ours, so other countries likely were as well. In our world, Britain adopted a policy of peaceful disengagement from its colonies once stable, non-Communist governments were available to transfer power to, but in the Fallout world they could have fought to the last.

Similarly, maybe France won in Algeria? Maybe even the common struggle to keep their empires from dissolving was what led to the formation of the European Commonwealth?

Seems like far more trouble than it's worth - brutal oppression will only get you so far. The reason Britain chose peaceful disintegration is because, well, that was the only option left. Where's the money coming from to fund the troops needed for the exploitation? Where's the public support? Where's the international support?

I see where you're coming from, but from a practical standpoint it is impossible and would have led to a late Empire characterized more by American Revolution style wars than Gandhi.

Yes, but would it really be more impractical and unrealistic than the US occupying Mexico and annexing Canada, brutally oppressing any resistance (as seen in the execution scene in the FO1 intro)? Also, maybe they had support from the United States government? Maybe China and the Soviet Union were more active in Africa, and the Americans supported British colonialism out of fear of their former colonies coming under the influence of communist states?

I'm not saying that you are wrong or that it's entirely rational. Just saying that a more militaristic Britain, trying to cling to its colonies and fight for the remnant of its empire it has left in my opinion stylistically fits the setting.

It might seem foolish to argue against impossibilities in a world of weaponised lasers and magic radiation, but the Fallout universe tries to maintain a reasonable view of geopolitics.

The U.S. we (briefly) see in Fallout 1 is a bloated militaristic capitalist machine, fat off the profits of being one of the world's premier superpowers for over 150 years.

The Britain we see at the end of WWII is flat broke (lend lease, anyone?), bombed out, war weary and at the nadir of it's period as a superpower. There was no money, there was no public support, and the age of colonialism was flat dead by the end of WWII, the mantle being passed to the new empires.

You're advocating a kind of 'global Vietnam' whereby the U.S. props up old colonies against communism? Plausible, given the U.S. we see in Fallout. However, they'd be mad to do it in the name of prolonging dying empires. The real life U.S. could care less about the French claims to the colony of Vietnam, they cared about, well, it's debatable, but I'll say - killing communists. This on a wide scale could indeed lead to what we see in the Fallout universe given the 'Red Menace' culture.

None of this would allow the British Empire to outlive it's natural lifespan. Too many changes, too little resources.

Edit: Didn't see your edit. Stylistically it could work, of course, and would fit in the Fallout world, which of course doesn't have to make sense. However, since we've no evidence to infer that this is the case, we are forced to extrapolate likely possibilities from real-life and cold logic.

Most of the empire's colonies would likely gain independence anyway, yes, but I think in the Fallout universe the British could have put up more of a fight and Britain could realistically keep at least a fraction of its former empire in the 20th century, and then in the 21st century try to recreate its former glory and invade its former colonies for resources.

Again; I have to go back to - put up more of a fight with what? I think you're underestimating just how broke Britain was in the late forties and fifties - rationing carried on until '54! There's nothing in Fallout canon (beyond the general militarism, which can and has backfired spectacularly for empires throughout history) that suggests Britain had the capability to do what you suggest.

Britain still maintains dependencies today, of course, relics of the Empire, but even if the Empire had been partially rebuilt in the Fallout universe - it doesn't really matter, as I've argued before - Washington D.C. is more or less isolated from the rest of the continental United States, an oversees empire would fare even worse in a post nuclear world.

Of course, there is no chance for there still being a British Empire after the Great War.

I have to agree with lorca and underline how unbelievably mucked up Britain was after WW2. Isn't Britain the only developed country to have recieved an IMF emergency fund?

If there was a British Empire around the time of Fallout 3, I think that they would have been a HUGE target by other countries, even equal to how much of a target the USA was as Britain would still be a superpower. In the real world it still was even, but not as much as the Soviet Union or USA as it was weakened greatly by WW2. But I doubt in the Fallout world it was an empire, it still had much control over India but by the 50s they were independant from them although still allies. The only land the UK had control over was the British Isles and a few islands dotted around like the Falklands. But still, the nuclear war happened around 2077, well over one hundred years for the UK to recover from its weakness and Europe to recover from WW2. The Resource Wars did weaken Europe to fight each other but the UK would have had the advantage of being an Island, giving it a lot of strength and defence. The Royal Navy was still the premier naval force and any invading countries would have been easily destroyed. The only threat UK would have faced would have been within and it would have been plausible for it to split once again into Scotland, Wales, England and Northern Ireland which would have great instability and an easy target for invasion should this have happened.

If there was a nuclear Holocaust across the world, then Britain would still be targeted regardless of its strength as it was a key player in international affairs and would have many enemys eager to nuke it. Britain would have been bombed to bits much like other major European countries like France, Germany. Spain, Italy etc . Europe was the heart of the world and a major political area and America was and is still largely economically dependant on Europe. If the EU was formed and didn't fall apart then it would have been a global superpower to rival America and China, although in the Fallout world this wasn't the case. China would have nuked Europe to have effects on the USA.

Oh and whoever is saying that the UK is still paying back its loans to the USA, those ended in the 60s or 50s or around about then....

Actually the U.K. only finished repaying its war debts in 2006.
Cite: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6215847.stm

The premier naval force post WWII is the United States Navy. There's no contest. In the Fallout timeline we've no idea how strong China's navy is, but my guess is it's at least as powerful as the U.S. Navy to be able to pull off the invasion of Alaska.

Iceland is first world.

What? We do know... actually:

2053 December: Like an exclamation mark on the end of a very bad year, a terrorist nuclear weapon destroys Tel Aviv. - Vault Timeline

2054 January: Limited nuclear exchange in the Middle East raises fears throughout the world. - Vault Timeline

The fact that the European Commonwealth used "limited nuclear exchange in the Middle East" forced me to believe they fired nuclear weapons into the Middle East. The Middle Eastern powers, if it would even be possible to call them that, did not respond in kind with their own nuclear weapons except through terrorist attacks on Israel, possibly still under British control.



They aren't clear, at all, about how the civilized world went, actually. In the Fallout 1 intro it mentions "most" of the world being reduced to cinders, not all of it, which can presumably mean just about anything, it isn't clear on who fired nukes or what was nuked or if "cinders" even means nuclear fires. In my mind it refers to radiation after the Chinese and the Americans launched nukes at each other, which would have created worldwide fallout, this would have "burned" away the ecosystem and people (which is actually substantiated in the Fallout 2 intro "their spirits becoming part of the background radiation that blanketed the Earth"), while China and America would have almost nothing left standing from the bombs impact. After the brutality that I presume was used by all of the sides that participated in the Resources Wars I came to the conclusion that the bombs used most extensively were neutron bombs, (why would you destroy what you need with out-dated atomic bombs?) which would explain why there are still standing structures in places like DC.

I'm not saying atomic bombs weren't used at all, look at the crater in DC for instance (obviously, it is from a direct hit from an atomic bomb), the Chinese would have wanted to extinguish any places in the United States that would have posed a threat to any future invasion. They wanted to destroy urban centers (urban warfare isn't fun), military bases (a direct hit with a nuclear bomb can rip through the surface and into underground complexes), but leave in tact vital areas where they would need to get resources from, like mines and oil refineries, thus they would have used neutron bombs. Neutron bombs would have released much more radiation, as well, than would a normal nuclear bomb, thus it would have led to a much more severe worldwide fallout that falls much more in line with what the intros describe, (you know, humanity on the brink of extinction and such, it would also explain those who died in the sewers and the metro).



Might I state a small point of fact? The United States has never helped "prop-up" colonization unless we were doing the colonizing. Not only would it never (and never did) serve our interests, but it is against the sincerest American ideal of self-determination. The divergence was after WWII so self-determination would have been enshrined in American diplomatic policy. In the Vietnam War we fought on both sides of the conflict, helping the nationalist defeat the French colonizers and then fighting with the nationalists (those, at least, who we believed should be the true nationalists) to fight the Commies (who confusedly were the nationalists) in the name of democracy. In Vietnam, unlike in the rest of the world where America fought like in Korea, America confronted for the first time a place where the people actually wanted to be Communists. Communism wasn't forced on the Vietnamese, like in Eastern Europe, if anything, capitalism was. I see no reason why the United States, with a lot of its own problems, would even think about helping those in the European Commonwealth hold onto their empires, it would make no sense.



There were four superpowers in Fallout lore, the United States, the Soviet Union, Communist China and the European Commonwealth. If the British stood as their own superpower I doubt they would have joined the European Commonwealth, in our timeline the British didn't want to join the early EU because they had their own commonwealth of nations, there really would be no incentive for them to fight alongside those it would feel would drain from their coffers.



In that case, why would the UK want the headache of an Empire again, they could seek those same resources in Europe and gain those resources much quicker as they would actually be developed.



After World War II, most of Her Majesty's Royal Navy was disbanded so the British could pay their expensive war debt, the colonies, that would have been a burden at this point financially before resources were scarce way after WWII, were given up in order to pay for that debt and the British occupation of Ireland was ended in order to disband a huge chunk of the army. In a capitalist world economics drives decision making, I see no reason why that would have changed in the Fallout universe.



It is possible that the United Kingdom split apart. It also possible, that like in the first Great War and World War II, the country stuck together to fight its enemies. I doubt, though, the British would have been able to hold onto Northern Ireland, with how violent the IRA is. It would have made no sense for the British to obstruct Irish unification, wasting valuable resources for very little pay-off.

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Heart of the world? Maybe before 1900s, but by 2077 Europe was in full decline in being a player in international affairs, the European Commonwealth dissipating was the last gleans of glory for old Europe. A Europe after the Resource Wars, the brutality involved, would have made a very unusual target to attack. I like to think people are a bit more logical than they are given credit for and a nation would only use nuclear arms once it knew there was no other way to stop an advancing enemy. Once the US was on the verge of occupying all of China, the Chinese launched their missiles at the United States and vice verses, ending the world turning it into an irradiated mess.



The Chinese, if they launched a surprise invasion, with their far better submarine fleet protecting the ways of supply, could have easily pulled it off establishing a beachhead and securing Alaska before the army would have even been able to respond. You know, Japan had taken Kiska island on the tip of Alaska during World War II, we didn't figure that out until late 42' after a month or two occupation. Alaska is very remote, we Americans sometimes forget it even existed, I see little reason for American attitudes toward Alaska to have changed that much after World War II. The only thing we did to fortify our position in Alaska due to the Japanese invasion was to build a highway through it, that doesn't mean we put sophisticated radar stations all down the coast.

You're right, I don't know why I forgot about that fragment. Thanks for reminding me that. Anyway, I still think that most of the countries that had nukes launched them on October 23. From the original GURPS: Vault 13 timeline (which describes in more detail some stuff that is only briefly summarized in Chris Avellone's timeline):

But the fact we don't know, and there is an explicit attempt at disinformation on the part of the developers, who fired missiles wouldn't that timeline stand to contradict that, doesn't that particular timeline only act as flavor rather than canon in that case? Even if it can be accepted as canon, wouldn't that make a Chinese borne defensive strike on America more plausible?

I'm pretty sure you can track where a missile is being fired from, knowing who fired a missile shouldn't be a problem by 2077 either, it would only be stopping it. The computer screen would show nukes headed for the United States from China, if they fired first which is the most plausible situation, and then suddenly an American response, I doubt anyone else would interfere in this exchange in fear of having nukes sent at them.

Of course, whoever was fired at in 2077 knew where the missiles were from. It's just that after the Great War, no one really knows who struck first.

Ok, so, then "burning" does mean the fallout after the bombs fell, the residual radiation, rather than from nuclear explosions, except for those involved in the nuclear exchange between the United States and Communist China.

While it is no longer canon, the original timeline from the GURPS times shows that the original intent was that other countries were also involved in the nuclear exchange, not only China and the US. After all, both countries had their allies, vassal states and other, minor enemies, many of whom likely had nukes of their own.

But after the Resource Wars I think many of those alliances would have been severed, maybe even as early as the creation of the European Commonwealth, there is no NATO, or at least no mention of one, nor a UN, alliances and friends went out the window once resources dried up. It seems from the original intent, to me, that everything has been changed. That in reality there was only the nuclear exchange between the US and China, thus the ultimate obliteration of both sides and massive fallout across the globe. A war-torn Europe, especially an isolated island nation like Britain, would hardly have survived the radiation exposure and lack of food and resources for that long after the bombs would have fell.

That would have created the exact same conditions, as well as if you add in the death of the local ecosystem which would have led to barren wastes, as in the United States. Those underground would live to fight another day, but the cities of Europe and its infrastructure, pretty beat up already from constant warfare and decay, would be in such a shape to where it would hardly matter if atomic bombs hit or not.

Alliances on equal terms - maybe. But the US could still be trying to use some of them as vassal states. Also, the status and political leanings of the Soviet Union in the Fallout world is largely a mystery. The official FO3 guide mentions Soviet and German supersoldier mutation programs.



The GURPS timeline mentions "other countries" firing their missiles, so it was at least the original intent that China and the US weren't the only ones involved in the exchange, and I see no reason to assume otherwise for the final version as well.

I know. I was speaking within the some alternative Fallout timeline.

but the GURPS timeline isnt the official timeline, if i remember it correctly.