In my opinion, I think the world would have a been rebuilt a bit more than it is in fallout 3. Even DC being the main target for nuclear bombs, there are still a lot of other regions that would have not been bombed and would be able to aid in the clean up and recivilization of the area.

200 years is a long time. Where were we in 1810? Riding around on horseback. Compound fracture? Cut the limb off. Muskets as weapons. Life expectancy of around 40. You get my point.

Yes it would have been very hard times, but it would have been overcome.

I would give it about 50-75 years.

you should better examine technological advancements, in 1800 we used muskets, now we use lasers (yea we do, i heard of one that can incinerate anything it shot.) we also have the ability to use radioactive bullets. little bombs that cdan destroy an entire building, and big metal birds.

but, looking at radiation that needed to be cleared... if you went out of your shelter in 50 - 75 years you would either be dead, or ghoulified.

now, mole rats are real big, even with radiation it would take millions of years for a mole rat to get that big through evoloution.

and the bombs fell around 2000 and something, and the world had enough time to completly use all of it's natural resources, might be a bit short in my eye.

While the half-life of fallout from nuclear bombs isn't measured in hundreds of years, you still have to remember just how many bombs were in use. The amount of radioactive matter that has to dissipate before the world becomes safe is mind-bogglingly huge. This fallout isn't just going to be at the blast sites either. It's going to be caught with the wind and be moved around all over the planet, particularly when the entire world is being bombed at the same time. What regions would've been safe from that fallout?

And another question, how exactly do you clean up after a nuclear apocalypse? It takes eons for things to not contain lethal doses of radiation and by then almost all the vehicles have rusted to death and there's largely no fuel for them anyway. How do you clean away that much rubble? What do you do with all the rubble? Where do you take it? And why bother?


200 years sounds like a long time but you've got to remember that there's also been a lot of people around, working hard to contribute. There's nearly 7 billion people living on the planet at this point. At the time of FO3 there's probably at most one or two million people left alive in North America, probably much less than that. New California Republic is the largest town in America with a massive... 3000 inhabitants.

There were some 120 vaults with at most a thousand people in each, probably much fewer than that. How many could possibly live outside the vaults? Not only would those people need to survive the blasts (and being in a metro or mountain cave or merely a solidly constructed concrete basemant might with extreme luck provide that opportunity), but they'd also need food supplies and indoor shelter for at least a few years, or the fallout would do what the blasts didn't.


Are they completely done cleaning up after Katrina in New Orleans? It's been 5 years now, and that's in essentially the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world, and without a massive decimation of the population. Increase the damage by a factor of at least a thousand and reduce the population to one percent. You still think it wouldn't take more than 50 years to clean up everything?

Just on a little sidenote, Uranium (the most common radioactive material used for controlled fission reactions, used in the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings) has a half-life of 4000 Billion years. And thats only for it to be divided by two, to then think if how long it would take until it was safe again is, as you put it, mind-boggling.

Uranium does have a very long half life, but not quite that high. Uranium 238 has a half life of 4 billion years, not 4000 billion, while Uranium 235 has a half life of 700 million years. Further those numbers are for natural conditions. Specifically they only apply when the Uranium is not undergoing the chain reaction which leads to the explosion of an atomic bomb. The whole point of atomic bombs is to make all the Uranium decay in a very short time. So the half life of Uranium is really irrelevant.

Unfortunately I don't know what the half lifes of the final fission products of the explosion are (or even what these products are), but it is interesting to note that both Hiroshima and Nagasaki are doing just fine. Granted, they were both hit by a single bomb, but Hiroshima at least was already being rebuilt in the late forties, less than 5 years after the bombing.

Also note that in Hiroshima that single bomb destroyed 69% of the buildings and severly damaged a further 7%. This leads me to belive that in order to cause the destruction we can see in D.C. itself it would only take one or two bombs. Of course the entire Capital Wasteland had to be hit by more bombs, but altogether I'd estimate about 10-15 bombs would be enough to cause the required destruction.

We should also consider the first two Fallout games. Fallout 1 takes place about a century before Fallout 3 and at that time the west coast was already as developed as the Capital Wasteland is in 2277, if not more. In Fallout 2 (about 30 years before FO3) the New California Republic is actually a nice town. It's got policemen in bright blue uniforms while the buildings are white, clean, and not ruined at all.

Then again Caifornia has the most geeks & nerds (Silicon Valley) while Washington D.C. has the most politicians, so maybe that's what made the difference.

Also they didn't have super mutants or any force in nature like that which would hinder humanity's progress in the 1800's

Hiroshima was rebuilt after the war and is occupied today, which suggests that the period of radioactivity is not as long as the game suggests.

On the other hand, when the Roman Empire fell, it took humanity over 1,000 years to get back to the level of technology and comfort that the Romans took for granted. Never underestimate the power of the human race to trap itself in a barbaric lifestyle.

My bad, ofc its 4 billion. Just got a little carried away xD

Anyhow, my point was that if this was the effect of the first two bombs developed, imagine what another 132-ish years would do for the technology. Also, I'm not quite sure of whether it was an A-bomb or an H-bomb, though since the thingy given by Mr. Burke in order to detonate the megaton bomb is a fusion pulse charge, it would imply that it is indeed an H-bomb.

Bombs fell 2077, 2277-fallout 3 setting. Realistically speaking, I don't think that molerats and cockroaches will grow 18 times their sizes. I think it was a quite realistic date considering there was next to no radiation. I mean, Chernobyl is still radioactive! However, because they keep bumping the dates of the games further and further into the future, it's gonna be super lame because at a certain point, there's going to still be endless wastes when there's supposed to be lush green grass.

When they started rebuilding Hiroshima, they had no idea about the cancer rates they'd experience later on. Chances are they do know about the connection between radiation and cancer in the Fallout universe. Also keep in mind that Hiroshima was hit by a single, poorly designed nuke. The Wasteland in FO3 was hit by a ton of them and then there was the nuclear fallout from all the explosions in the rest of the world. Do not under estimate the radiation from a nuclear holocaust. It is by no means comparable with that of a single nuke.


That's when the Enclave FEV gets fairly interesting, isn't it? Super mutants, giant scorpions and roaches, giant pyroants, wolverine-rats, cheetah-bears, reptilian Freddy Krueger knockoffs, ninja turtles on steroids... The options are pretty much endless, aren't they?

Considering that FEV is a semi-successful super-soldier serum that redoes DNA into a quad-helix, I'd say that trying to assume anything about how critters would turn out is hopeless.

I wouldn't be surprised to find some 500' tall brahmin that spits acid from both heads, and eats concrete, frankly.

I think 200 years is a bit long as well. It's hard to imagine there being so much stuff left lying around after that long. Likewise the buildings and roads would have decayed more and just buried under the earth. Maybe civilisation would have been re-established as well, but it's hard to tell what a setback a world wide nuclear conflict would really be.

Having said that, Fallout is just one big, fantastic work of fantasy so it's not really worth obsessing about the realism too much.

Maybe it is 200 years and not 50 because if it were 50 you'd have loads of pre-war people still alive and that would alter the tone of the game. Another motive might have been the need to set the game after FO1 and FO2 which were sooner after the war.

Hmmm, it's a bit mixed up

Most radiation from nuclear bombs would be gone within 90 days (most bunkers are built to sustain an individual that long) while there is much radiation around in Fallout 3. Although, a lot is from nuclear power plants and machines which may have different half-lives

The time taken for mutations to occur to the same degree of mole rats, super mutants and mirelurks would take hundreds of thousands to millions of years.

There would be much less rubble and debris around if it had been around 200 years and probably the government would have set itself back up fairly quickly.

However, fallout 3 is not meant to be the most scientifically accurate game (though I would love to play a post-apocalyptic survival game with no monsters, mutants or things like that. Just people struggling to survive)

does it really matter?

In reality it would take up to as long as 1000 years(or more!) for the Earth's air to be just clean enough to breathe, and for enough radiation to clear up that life can live again.