My bet was on the CMC.

Lots of good info in this thread. Indeed, there is no way in hell the bomb in Megaton would work after a decade, much less two centuries. The power supply alone would have made it a dead deal. I'll cut them some slack on the form factor. Yes, it looks like fatman (even fatter), but in a world with vacuum-tube computers, they wouldn't have had what we needed to make the bombs smaller. EMP would not have been a problem for bombers. However, they would have been carrying maybe two of these huge beasts and likely heading for urban and industrial targets, since counter-force would have been long off the target list by this point. So, putting a bomber carried bomb in the vicinity (but not directly on top) of DC isn't out of the question.

What I can't figure out is how satcom facilities were let untouched. Particularly those with uplink to mini-nuke dropping platforms. I'm thinking that goes pretty high on my frag list.

Indeed, what could possibly be safer than a missile silo filled with lots of valuable high-priority targets during a strategic nuclear war? :shrug:

Joking, aside, I'm going to echo the suggestions of others and say it's probably two hours from the first detonations to the last, and only in regards to strategic weapons. Anything in the tactical or miniature range would have done nothing more than make the rubble bounce a bit and is thus rather unimportant in the grand scheme of things, at least with regards to the Great War.

Additionally, I think the idea of the world being destroyed in two hours is more a narrative device meant to be thought provoking, similar to the oft-mentioned fact that it's unknown who even fired the first missile.

This is a VERY easy answer, NO ONE ever has enough weapons to service all the targets they need. At the height of the cold war, we had over 50,000 unique targets.

Also: sometimes, you just get LUCKY with your countermeasures, and stop everything that's inbound to your location.

Put the two together, and you get: the Chinese obviously underestimated the number of warheads and PenAids needed to overwhelm the defenses of that satcom array sufficiently to destroy the hardened structures at those sites. (Note the lack of office buildings: SOMEthing thereabouts got destroyed ... just not the really STRONG buildings.)

Actually, that makes me think: Did we or anybody else develop effective ballistic missile defenses in the Fallout universe?

As I understand it, the kind of defensive system that would be necessary to stop a MIRV-equipped ICBM would require some serious electronics far in advance of what we managed to achieve in Fallout. Look at the computers - they're still big reel-to-reel and vacuum tube tube types attached monochromatic cathode ray tube monitors. Clearly we never achieved the integrated circuit and microchips and may not have even managed to make it to transistors. I mean, look at the Pip-Boy, which is the 2070's state of the art miniaturized electronics but is obsoleted by what we would consider old cellphones and PDAs.

In contrast Fallout has humanity's mastery over fission and the development of fusion power, which is the reason we've got housekeeping robots and power armor. While this is nice on the warfighting front (you can bet your ass the USMC would sell its soul to get their hands on the T-51b), and probably allows more powerful weapons than we currently have, it doesn't lend itself to defensive weapons so much.

The computers may still be Vacuum-tube based reel-to-reel machines - but, those same computers can be, and sometimes are, home to full-blown Artificial Intelligence.

Then there're the Protectrons, Robobrains, and Sentry Robots. And Power Armor. And man-portable energy weapons. And working Fusion Reactors. And Fusion-powered cars/trucks/buses/etc. Aircraft with Fusion-fuelled jet engines.

Heck, even the PIP-Boy 3000. For something with vacuum tubes in it, it's AWFULLY capable, given it's relatively-compact size. Don't you agree?

So, consider an AI computer with several batteries of ARTILLERY-sized Laser or Plasma weapons. In orbit (think BOMB001, of Van Buren). Shooting down ICBMs, possibly (indeed, preferably) BEFORE releasing their MIRVs and PenAids.

And of course, being targeted themselves, largely by surface-to-orbit weapons. Fusion or even Fission rockets in "sprint mode" (meaning: happily consuming not just their fuel, but their own ENGINE PARTS, in a furious drive for acceleration) with tactical-scale nuclear warheads, launched from the surface, or from aircraft, from some of those ICBM-scale missiles, and perhaps even, yes, from enemy AI platforms in orbit.

Yeah, I would have put any satcom uplink with targeting ability near the top of my frago. There was maybe two dozen such red targets, tops.

Don't forget, you can always brute fource your way to ABM defense. (Nuke-tipped ABMs just need to get close to the incoming RV and poof. No super advanced electronics required) Hell, the Russians STILL have batteries of nuclear-tipped ABM's all around Moscow. So I don't see it as a problem in the fallout universe.

In the Fallout universe making a robot intelligent in the way a human (or an animal) is intelligent is easy.

This has the downside that things which humans find hard, so do Fallout computers/robots.

i.e. robots and computers in Fallout can replace people, and with huge expenditure of resources can fractionally exceed human beings. But they can't do what we routinely use computers for like sorting through million record databases in thousands of a second etc.

Well... that's the idea. But the simulated worlds in Fallout 3 and Anchorage don't really fit...