A question to the canon pro's:

I was wondering about the yield of nukes in the Fallout timeline. As has been stated in the wikia, Washington DC - being the Capital - was hit by several nukes, we therefore should assume that there are multiple "ground zero's" within the city of Washington DC; yet especially in the city centre (they surely didn't miss that, did they?) there are an awful lot of buildings more or less structurally intact, albeit ruined.

Now, looking at pictures of Hiroshima 1945, ground zero is basically empty of anything except some roads. There's virtually nothing above ground level.

Therefore my question: Have the nukes in Fallout universe actually had less yield than the Hiroshima bomb? Their blast radius depicted in game seems suspiciously small.

Thanks!

Well, I think that Bethesda/Black Isle/Interplay simply never payed much attention to that part...

Then again, Fallout 2's intro says this:

It could be exaggerated, of course, but there might be some truth within that.

According to http://fallout.gamepedia.com/Vault_Dweller%27s_Survival_Guide (Fallout 1 official manual) nukes had 200-750 kT. Little Boy (Hiroshima bomb) had 16 kT.

Most of the buildings in Japan at the time were wooden structures and a number of them had Rice Paper walls (temperate weather, no need for insulation, just privacy. Most of Tokyo at the time was leveled just with incendiary bombs in two or three nights of raids. There is an account of a group of technicians who were on the same Atoll as a nuclear blast that put out significanly more power than planned. They think it was 6 MT. They were in a bunker that was not designed to survive that level of blast damage, but they did make it through. If you look at the ground zero pictures, there is one building that is mostly intact, it was made with reinforced concrete. Most of the buildings in DC are masonry in construction and could handle blast effects if they were not too close to the blast.

Also, there are strategic nukes and tactical nukes. A strategic one could wipe an entire city from the planet, a tactical one would wipe out several blocks and blast damage the rest. For example the Tsar Bomba, a 50 plus Megaton Bomb had a blast radius of about 30 miles, but smaller nukes would only destroy reinforced buildings about a 1/4 of a mile away and damage buildings a mile or two away.

Very insightful, thanks alot.

Now that you mention it, I remember the Tokyo firestorm and the japanese housing actually multiplying it's effect mentioned somewhere. Same applied for Hiroshima ofc.

Then the Washington skyline makes sense. Kind of.

It's important to remember that Tsar Bomba was a weapon test for a Johnson measuring contest with the States, not an actual weapon. Too impractical, as it required specially-modified bombers to carry. Lower yield weapons, on the other hand...

The missiles in lonesome road resemble Titan II ICBMs. If its warhead is also similar then it would be lIke a B53 nuclear bomb which is 9 megatons or 9,000 kilotons.

Perhaps the Chinese used lower-yield, higher radiation bombs on Washington DC, with the intent of salting the earth, so to speak. Similarly, depending on rocket technology, perhaps the comparatively long distance between DC and China necessitated lighter payloads.

I agree.

What about these green glowing mushrooms? Do they emit radiation?

i think it was a pretty well thought out idea, i mean, the parachute it needed to slow its descent so the bomber could escape the blast radius in time was so large that it disrupted the russian textile market.

Well, I think some of it had to do with game play as well. If every thing was destroyed then it wouldn't be as fun. Not to mention the only intact nuclear weapons of Chinese origin that I have seen in FO world looked like they were bombs and not ICBMs. Atomic bombs are a mere shadow of thermal nuclear ICBMs. The Chinese would more than likely not be able to fly a 50mt or even a 20mt bomb very far. They sure did level out the White House, but failed horribly on the Capital Building.

It's entirely possible that China did not have ICBMs at all. IRL we were far a head of the Russians in missile technology in the 50's and early 60's. That is why they brought missles to Cuba, because their ICBM program was not capable of striking everywhere in the U.S at that time.

It's also posible that they hit where they could with missles, then used bombers where they could not hit with missles. Many bombers would have been lost to U.S. intercepting fighter aircraft, and other anti air measures minimizing the effectiveness of the Chinese bombing campaign.

The Soviets and Chinese most likely used small kiloton bombs/missiles. If they used the large megaton thermonuclear bombs/missiles there really wouldn't be much left. I'm referring to anything 5Megatons and higher. You can go to Youtube and look up nuclear tests. Find Castle Bravo, which was our largest yield, 15 megatons.

Japanese pre WW2 and World war 2 buildings were built from wood and paper. Even after nuking the few concrete buildings that were in Hiroshima stood, although damaged. The dome being the most famous example.

Also, not that Nukes are not like Mortar shells or air bombs, they are designed to explode in the air, not on impact.

For whatever it's worth there is a "Ground Zero" near Fort Bannister. Perhaps one of those 30-mile-radius bombs that CCNA mentioned might have been dropped there?

That would be a kiloton bomb not a 50 megaton bomb like CCNA mention. Castle Bravo a 15 megaton bomb left a crater that was 1.5 miles wide. That crater near Bannister isn't anything remotely that size.

This will give an idea of blast radius and the damage bombs can do. http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

you have just put the fear of god in me thanks lol.

i was thinking about this the other day fallout world is not ours and their history is different to ours (without the unknowns ) so we can say tho nuclear weapons would work prity much the same they would be used differently. Nearly all UK and most US weapons are missiles to be fired from submarines (in our world) but in a world without NATO would it still be the same? I'd say silos would be the main stay with bombers filling a battlefield and more short range roles as the lack of oversea bases making long range bombers unpractical but also making the long range submarine missions very risky (been in hostile or semi hostile waters with in a few days of leaving home)

Sure. But, as we know, everything in the game is drastically scaled down. That crater may not be an accurate size for a large real-world bomb, but then the DC ruins is not an accurate size for the real-world Washington DC either. I think you're being a little too literal. In Fallout very few places or distances between places are accurate by real-world measurements.

It could well be that the crater is meant to be seen as an artistic representation of ground zero. This is the way with way so many other things in the game. Arlington Cemetery, Takoma Park, Chevy Chase, ect...they're just artistic representations of real places. None of these things are accurately scaled.

Here are a few more things to think about.

You have three basic types of strategic nuclear weapons: Blast damage weapons, salted weapons and neutron weapons. Each are designed to produce different effects.

Blast weapons are used to destroy infastructure. Knock down buildings, bridges, etc. Airbursts will devestate a larger area than a surface burst will. In order to maximize the blast effect, the burst will be high enough where the fireball will not touch the ground. Typically a detonation of this nature will not produce a crater or a significant amount of fallout. (Basically, fallout comes from things svcked into the fireball).

In order to maximize fallout, you need surface bursts. But the product of a suface burst will rapidly degrade over time. Basically after about two months the fallout from a surface burst at ground zero no longer poses much of a hazard. This is where salted weapons come into play. Salted weapons (usually cobalt or strontium bombs) are designed to produce fallout that is hazardous for years. In the cae of cobalt bombs, the fallout can pose a hazard for upto 100 years. Surface burst will, of course, produce craters.

Neutron weapons are designed to produce casualties but leave the infrastructure largely intact. The primary destructive force in these weapons is high speed neutrons and there isn't much blast and thermal effects. It will kill a person in a building and leave the building in good shape. These like the blast weapons are airburst weapons but at a lower altitude.

Due to the number of craters and the residual radiation found in the craters, it would be safe to assume that the Chinese were using small salted weapons, a lot of them. This would also explain why a lot of the buildings are still standing and are more or less still structurally sound even 200 years after the war.

Another factor is that 2077 was technologically advanced (well, in some areas, but I'm sure constructing buildings is one of them) and full of people who were terrified of a nuclear war. It stands to reason that buildings would have been made to weather the apocalypse.

I'm not sure the USA tend to favor buildings with short lifespans but quick build/rebuild time e.g using a lot of wood where most European buildings have wood only in their roof. Government buildings in DC are mostly stone and would have been build before or very close to the time line split so not overly advanced and I doubt they would have pulled down a national sybol (Whitehouse etc) to rebuild it in 'super' stone as it would look defeatist to even hint American maybe nuked. The vault projects all seemed to be in the 10 years before the War and would have taken decades to rebuild all of DC

Good points there and it was probably a mix of whatever the Chinese could develop or had at the time

Survivability of a structure comes to several factors when nuclear weapons are involved which are the as follows of the top of my head

Good Megaton calculator http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Science/Nuke.html

http://www.remm.nlm.gov/zones_nucleardetonation.htm

1. Weapon Yield & Type as mentioned by gcubed

2. Weapon Detonation varies as to the target area zone which are ground, air, oceanic & Sub-oceanic and then outwards from ground zero when most structures are obliterated to x-miles radius based outwards on the weapon yield where as we see in-game places like Big Town and Minefield survived roughly intact and others are charred skeletal ruins

3. Structure construction, distance, and height from ground zero as super strong concrete and steel building of x-floors would probably take the brunt force of blast with concrete cracking and steel warping from the heat

4. Time passed and environmental conditions

5. Humans to maintain surviving structures

There are a few differences in construction. In FO3 we see a glaring one.

The Washington Monument in our world was completed in 1884 and is a stone structure without any kind of skeleton. The one in FO3 has a steel skeleton. So, the people in FO3 either tore the monument down and rebuilt it after WW II (the divergence is said to occur after WW II), or the divergence occured before WW II and was manifesting itself at least as far back as the late 1800's..

Or some accident happened, say an amateur pilot crashing in to the structure or other like it leaning to one side

I'm sure that's true (I don't know anything about this sort of thing), but my point was that if these people were so afraid of nuclear war that they would reserve a place in a vault for their families, they might change their habits and make buildings that can take serious damage. Especially considering that such a small portion of the country's population survived in the vaults; it stands to reason that the less wealthy, who couldn't escape to Vaults, would want to live in homes that gave them some chance in hell of survival.

http://www.atomicarchive.com/Effects/effects17.shtml

Lets not forget about fallout and that happy radiation that likes to linger on.

I think the world of Fallout used kiloton weapons which is why there are a lot of buildings still standing. With megaton weapons there wouldn't be much standing. Most modern nuclear arsenals have reverted back to using kiloton weapons and 1-2 megaton weapons. I don't think any countries in the nuclear club use anything more than 5 megatons. A MIRV weapon with 8 warheads in the 1 megaton range are more effective than a single 10 megaton bomb.