Been wondrin' that the nukes that were shot/dropped around USA seem to have been quite small. Ridiculous in power if I'd say.
Example number one is the Glow from Fallout 1. A deep hole, but it's barely 20m wide. A real nuke that could cause such a hole would make a crater streching to Los Angeles.
Second is the White House in FO3. A pathetic crater for a nuclear weapon. A real nuke, even from the 50's could easily wipe out half D.C. if aimed correctly.

I understand that for gameplay resons D.C. is still there but the nukes seem to be just basic strategic bombs dropped by any heavy aircraft.

I guess the radiation was more of it around the Glow, the hole itself looks more like a structal collapse of sorts than being directly bombed.
DC is Beths illogical job, so i don't really care about it.

Weren't the West-Tek Laboratories (later "The Glow") hit with a neutron bomb or something, not a nuke?

The Glow is the result of a direct hit from a nuke. The nature of the blast isn't explained, but West Tek has been completely erased from the surface, and only the undergound facilities remain. That crater is most likely the result of the spent warhead, as opposed to the explosion itself.

What also bothers me is the lack of nuke craters in California. Besides Glow, I haven't seen any marks of a nuke hit in California. Yet its still ruined wasteland.

Well the nukes themselves aren't designed to make craters, they're designed to detonate above the surface for maximum effect. The "Little Boy" used against the Japanese in 1945 had a predetermined detonation distance of 600 meters above the city.

Yes but it wipes out every building. Cities in FO1 have either broken buildings or no city at all.
A nuked city would only have streets left.

A Neutron Bomb is a Nuke, but acts differently.

Wiping out every building is a little ambitious, reinforced concrete buildings (mainly due to earthquake threats) were survivors of the Hiroshima bombings whilst also being close to the hypocenter of the explosion. Air detonation forces a blast downward more than sideways. This is the reason why the Genbaku survived having been just 150meters from the hypocenter.

Besides, West Tek's surface structure has been completely obliterated, what more do you want?

Well the nukes didn't sweep the earth clean when they struck cities, you can see that in the FO intro, and the bits of LA you see. West Tek got hit by a couple of nuclear weapons, no ? Prime target due to being a research center, that and it's not as large as a city I'd wager so obliterating it was slightly easier. It's a bit odd how the White House is just a crater, but the buildings nearby are largely intact, you'd think that near ground zero there'd be a lot of scorched earth and not much else.

@Pistolero

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/Trinity-ground-zero-men-in-crater.jpg


Trinity test crater.

Rather small, isn't it?

It's probably just for gameplay purposes. Sure, they could have done it realistically, and destroyed pretty much everything, and leave a blasted landscape, but then, we wouldnt have much of a game, would we?

Anyway, I'm guessing the bombs were relatively small, probably around the 5-15 megaton range. From what it sounds like, the bombs were dropped by planes, so I think that would a limiting factor of the size of them? There didnt seem to be a lot of ICBMs flying.

Also, like someone else said, reinforced buildings are able to survive a balst wave, and considering that in the FO universe, the threat of nuclear war had been hanging over their heads since the start of the Cold War, I'm guessing that a lot of buildings were rebuilt, or reinforced in some way. So even if a powerful bomb did hit, the building could stay standing, albeit in a muchly buggered up state.

The buildings you see in Fallout 1 are essentially appartments (albeit with some funky gothic architecture) where only the ground floor is still standing. The "roofs" are the remains of the second floor and higher, completely obliterated.

In my opinion, they had like <0.5 megatons. Just look Megaton (the city:) ), If the bomb was like the Nagasaki one, the lone wonderer wouldn' t survive the explosion.

CA would mostly get airbursts, since there aren't a lot of missile silos out here. In general, if you aren't trying to dig up something, you detonate your nuke well above ground to get the maximum reach. I find that part of FO3 quite realistic. (Mind you, it isn't very realistic to find such high levels of radiation around the wasteland at this point.)

would have been nice though with some ruins reaching higher then that.

The crater of the glow is huge. It takes up a whole square on the fast travel map. The hole you climb down is a structure failure of the vault. You have to figure your standing in a huge crater who knows how deep. Deep enough to reach the top of an underground vault.

There is no Vault at the Glow, the underground is apart of the West Tek factility. Though you'd be right about the crater, you are definitely in it when you arrive. As for being strong enough to reach underground Vaults, not at all likely, but realistically all the surface caves would have fallen through, entombing all the Vaults permanently. But for the sake of plot none of them suffered this fate, that we know of.

Oops, kinda put The Glow and Vault 12 together. Point still being the crater is very large.

To be fair, a lot of the Blast from Megatons nuke would have been directed up, the crater would have seen to that.

And a lot of it would have been absorbed by the walls of the crater.

Another thing you have to remember about Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that most of the cities' buildings were made of wood and paper. Not much of that would survive nuclear fire. As FalloutChris mentioned, the few buildings made from reinforced concrete DID survive..

Probably a lot of bombs were used, so there'd be ultratons of force released.

About building integrity and large parts of DC still standing:

My theory about that is as follows: We do not know the amount of ICBMs, the number of warheads inside the ICBMs and the overall strength. Also unknown is the accuracy of said warheads. Nowadays we can nuke a flea of a dog's balls due to our advanced targeting computers. However, the Fallout universe focused on harnassing the Atom, not on advanced computer technology. Therefor it is acceptable to say that the the MX-774 developed in 1947 before or slightly after the divergence, had an accuracy of about 2 or 3 miles wich didn't improve until the Atlas-missile series in 1957/1958 (after divergence)

Concluding from that it is probable why much builings of the cities are still standing, the just didn't get hit right on target and the blast wave wasn't enough to bring them down. Also, a lot of bombs seem to have dropped by airplanes (suggested by the shape of fort Constantine and Megaton bomb) wich were shot down. It is probable that due to the lack of safety devices we have on modern day nuke's they could also have exploded.

Problem remains that we don't know who, why or how the launches happened. For all we know it could be rebels that launched a nuke on the chinese capital scaring the [censored] out of Uncle Sam who retaliated, allowing the world to join the party.
It is very unlikely, but possible.

Also, FO1 LA had several (taller) buildings. I know for sure since I played them recently.

Well, if they used cobalt thorium G, the readiation would have a longer half life, mein fuhrer.

Being serious, there were thousands of bombs used. The radiation would have been huge.

if you ask me, the "hole" you see at the glow was caused by a bunker-buster bomb, since the hole is found at (iirc) all levels of that facilty. the radiation level you find there suits a tactical hit with a neutron/salted bomb more than a "conventional" nuke as well.
so I'd say it was either a double strike - surface "cleaned" with a h-bomb first, then a small neutron/salted bunker-buster to kill survivors without destroying the techs in the underground facility, and make sure nobody's gonna get in there any time soon - or maybe some kind of combined bomb with the same effects... but who can tell what kind of weapons of mass destruction will be available in 60 years..?

[edit] another possibilty for the massive rad level there was, that it was part of automated self-destruction procedure to ensure the enemy won't get hold of the high-end developments there...

Grrrrr.

Sorry for posting on something so early in the thread BUT....

5 to 15 MEGATONS would be a HUGE weapon. The largest yield on ANY weapon ever placed in the field was only 25 mT (The SS-18 Mod 3 which was designed to remove NORAD's HQ) Ivan's weapons range anywhere (I'm going this from memory, so my numbers might be a bit dodgey) from 100kT to 750kT. Now the Sov's did have at least two weapon systems with higher yields, one IIRC was around 3 mT and the aforementioned SS-18 m3, BUT these were designed for very specific purposes. Unlike many things in life BIGGER is not always BETTER with a nuclear weapon! Now, here is the little secret, most major powers DO NOT LIKE to have very large warheads for two simple reasons, one they are big and heavy, and two, since they are big and heavy they are harder to make into MIRV's. Also, if you can make your delivery system accurate, a much smaller warhead does the same job. (Example: Why shoot someone in the face with a 120mm tank shell when a single 9mm round would do the job?) The purpose of nuclear weapons are exactly the same as a laser guided bomb. You kill your target DEAD. Its not some magical engine of destruction. Its simply the weapon of ABSOLUTE LAST RESORT.

That being said, that was Ivan's stockpile. We didn't consider the Chineese (the folks who we are at war with in this game) AS LARGE of a threat as the Soviets, so I don't remember as much about their systems. I seem to recall that their main ICBM had a ~5mT yield, but it was VERY innacurate and they didn't have many of them. Which means, it was a city killer. Now, what do I mean by that? You might say Gee, a big bomb could really take out (name your high value target here). You're right of course, but the thing is this: If its a hardened target, you have to get in CLOSE. Say you hit 1000m from your hardened target (Lets say a communications bunker) , there is a good chance that you did not kill it because you didn't get close enough. Sure, you beat the crap out of everything surrounding it, but you have to service the target again. You may ask, well, why build the damn thing. Pretty simple. Its one HELL of a way to make a statement. You're projecting your will/force (as a nation), and pretty much saying don't screw with us or else. May sound juvinine, and sophmoric, but the threat of losing one of your major cities is one hell of a diplomatic tool.

Always remember, nukes are scary. Whether you are showing that you can lob an RV 12k miles and hit within 100m of a target or saying that you can make a city into glass, the most effective thing is the THREAT. Because if they ever fly, everyone has a real bad day.

Sorry for the novella