I'm relatively new to the game and I'm trudging along and I came along to a mission that dealt with the retrieval of "Fat Boy" man portable nukes. ( I won't go into details on this mission needless to say) Fat Boy is obviously a reference to "Fat Man," the plutonium bomb dropped on dropped on Nagasaki. What you might not know tho, is there were tactical nuclear devices that could be launched from a 3 inch (iirc) mortar in the U.S. Army inventory at the beginning of the 1960's. Furthermore, unlike the game, the blast of these rounds would kill the crew that used them. What I mean is, there wasn't a kicker stage like the weapon in game has in the game that put the crew safely outside the blast radius. Obviously it would be suicidal to use and so they'd only be used upon orders from on high right? ..... Well... Not quite. You see, the person with the authority to launch these mini-nukes was the man in charge of the individual crew.... Not the Platoon Sergeant or Platoon leader, the man in charge to the crew.... Which at the time was a corporal. The very bottom of the Non-Commissioned Officer ranks.....

Had the USSR and the USA gone to war prior to 1963, all out nuclear Armageddon could have been brought on by a junior non-commissioned officer instead of the men (and now women) in charge of fighting that war...

(I am probably overly dramatizing things a bit, but I take liberties there to inspire thought into the subject!)

What's a "Fatboy"? Their is a weapon called the "Fatman" that uses mini nukes, it has a legendary variant called the "big boy" if that's what you mean.

I'm pretty sure the use of any nuclear device has to be ok'd by the highest command (President)...so in the event of nuclear war the President would still have to approve of those weapons being even given to the soldiers in the first place, then after that whatever...its not like the soldiers would be running around with mini nukes waiting for a corporal to tell them to use them..

I don't think so. There's not much data about the launcher, but according to wikipedia it had range of 2 and 2.5km and nuclear warhead equivalent of 10-20 ton of TNT so no, blast would definitely not kill the crew. BTW radiation would not kill them either since radiation from explosion was lethal up to 400m.

As for your main question, no, firing of this weapon would not have started all out nuclear war because it was not strategic weapon. Only firing of strategic weapon (intercontinental ballistic missile, bomb dropped from a bomber etc...) would have started all out nuclear exchange.

BTW, this was not by far only tactical nuclear weapon. There were, and still are nuclear warheads for common artillery shells and even for anti-aircraft rockets. I know that Soviets had version of SAM missile armed with nuclear warhead against NATO bombers and I am pretty sure USA had one as well.

Nukes were/are more common in the army then you would believe.

It's a reference to a BoS mission. Again, I'm not going into details about said mission.

I thought that too.

It was called the M-28/29 Davey Crockett and they were deployed mostly in the European command. They could launch up to a few miles so there was no immediate threat to the launch crews.

I have thoroughly beaten this entire game and I don't recall ever hearing the term 'Fat Boy' in this game. The Fatman is the portable mini-nuke launcher.

I can only think of two possible quests that you're referring to.

I think you mean Fatman...not Fat Boy. Unless I was just totally not paying attention and missed this.

Fat Man (Nagasaki) and Little Boy (Hiroshima) were the two bombs dropped during WW2. The launcher in Fallout is named after Fat Man and its ammunition is modeled on the Fat Man bomb.

I'm sure I read somewhere that during the cold war, America's military top brass were actually contemplating blowing up the Moon to prove some sort of bizarre point. Sooooo a mortar that fires small atom bombs? Yeah [censored] it, why not.

I wish they did the moon thing though, stupid lazy moon, never did nothing for no one I tells ye.

Well, it doesn't matter if the OP got the names wrong or not, it's still interesting as far as in-game is concerned. In reality, there were suitcase nukes, the M-28s and such, and also (less well known) tactical nuclear mines. Imagine stepping on one of those... Heh. I kind of think those are for harbors and anti-tank use, but I don't know. Anyway, tactical nuclear weapons are far more common than one would think, and I'm not certain that White House approval is required for some of the smaller varieties. Typically, they are low yield devices of one sort or another and just another tool that is not commonly used.

Well actually, the moon creates tides, which help keep the oceans from becoming large swamps...

The moon also stabilizes the Earth's rotation. The Earth "wobbles" measurably as it rotates on it's axis, and without the gravitational influence of the Moon the wobble would get bigger and bigger, eventually causing worldwide disaster, earthquakes, floods, and potentially worse.

The Moon is actually slowly drifting away from the earth at the rate of about 1 to 1.5 inches a year, so eventually this will happen anyway....

Our solar system is going to die long before the Moon would drift out of Earth's orbit, so no, this won't happen eventually.

I'm not 100% certain on the (estimated) timing of the death of the sun compared to the drift of the moon, but that's fair enough.

The numbers escape me at the moment, but a calculation of this exact distinction was part of an assignment in one of my undergraduate astrophysics classes. It's all largely irrelevant though since we're talking about roughly 30 billion years or so from now. Our species will probably have been extinct for a long time by this point.

Yeah, 1-1.5 inches per year is not much in terms of distance when talking about space . /thread derail

On-topic: If anyone knows of the tabletop RP game called Paranoia, they definitely have hand-held mini nukes in that game, tacnukes, and tacnuke grenades, etc... Although in that game you have 6 clones, so if you use a tacnuke grenade one of your clones will probably be activated shortly. It's a super-fun comedy dark-future type game, I highly recommend it!

For some unknown reason the Japanese government is extremely twitchy about the names Fat Man and Little Boy. As a result Fallout 3 originally shipped to Japan without the Fat Man Launcher but did have a Nukalauncher in it. I don't know if that holds true for Fallout 4 though.

The US Army's OPFOR at the desert training grounds @ Ft. Irwin, California used to use drums full of oil and plastic explosives to simulate the look of a nuclear land mine detonation for training purposes.

In hindsight, a whole lot of pretty absurd atomic-icky things were developed and fielded during the early days of the cold war when atomic weapons were considered just another part of the war-fighting arsenal, rather than the world-ending political things they are considered now.

The game's take on a hand-held atom bomb catapult with a range of a half-city block at best is a comical nod to those times.

You see guys? Never mind creating tides or stabilizing the earth's rotation, all the moon does is derail topics on Bethesda's forums. That's all it's ever done.

Stupid moon.

Based on our current knowledge, the Sun is middle-aged and will nova in about 4 to 5 billion years. This won't destroy the solar system but it will certainly stamp "Paid in Full" on all the inner planets.

Well...actually the Sun is never going to nova. The Sun is a type of star that doesn't do this. It's going to expand into a red giant and basically dissipate the outer layers, and eventually cool down and condense into a white dwarf.

But, this is entirely off-topic...lol

I didn't know that. That's an interesting tidbit of information.