This guy over the internet says that the bomb in Megaton is American-made. Is it? And why would there be an american-made atom bomb dropped in the US?

It got knocked off of an American plane, maybe? It does have the Valt-Tec logo on it....

Maybe, is it possible that the US sold weapons to China and they used the weapons on the US?

The bomb did not make the crater.

What crater?

Megaton is built inside of a gigantic crater. That is why it slopes down to the middle of the city. There are parts of a large aircraft all over the place, such as the wings at the front door. My guess is that it was an American strategic bomber that went down. Perhaps it was flying too close to the nuclear explosion that did make the crater and went down in it. The bomb in the city was part of the plane's payload.

Or maybe the Chinese simply stole the plans for the American atomic bombs, and copied them. The bomb itself looks like the Fat Man from World War Two.

Ok that makes sense

Manya tells how all the plane parts came from a nearby airport. No planes crashed there.

Oh, then it must be

Most likely it was from a downed Chinese strategic bomber.

I doubt the US and China have the exact same bombs. We see a crapload of those same bombs in Fort Constantine.

I'm thinking that Vault-Tec sold the bombs to China and the USSR so that there would be a threat of nuclear war, so then people would be afraid and buy rooms in their vaults

If that was the case, then the Chinese wouldn't have had any reason to put the Vault-Tec logo onto it, would they?

Yep its made in America. Well the only thing the us is good at is friendly fire.

I doubt that Vault-Tec, as an Enclave affiliated corporation, would have sold the Chinese weapons, much less have access to them.

Recycled Item Appearance is my guess.

Vault-Tec is an Enclave affiliated corporation? How did you find that out? I searched the fallout wikia site and I didn't find anything that said they were... :confused:

Since Vault-Tec was a capitalistic corporation, I really don't see any reason why they wouldn't have provided weapons for everyone, as long as they got their money. It's what corporations do.

But I really find it more likely that is was on an US flighter on the way westwards, who crashed because of the EMP blast of the nukes. Perhaps it had even started from that airship carrier that is now Rivet City.


(reason for edit: I was mixing west and east once again.)

Because the Enclave had members from powerful corporations among it's people, Vault-Tec was responsible for the Enclave's massive Vault Experiment that's how much the Encalve controlled it; therefore, ultimately, the Encalve decided what went on at Vault-Tec.

Well, I am completely ignorant of atomic security and regulations in the fallout universe, but in this one nuclear warheads are very, very, very strictly controlled. A private corporation would never have access to one, let alone have the ability to sell an atomic weapon.....Without a government vetting process. To our enemies. Creating a HUGE scandal. And leaking top-[censored]-secret engineering to exactly who we don't want to leak it to.
So, sell an American-made atomic weapon to our rivals? [censored]in forget it, a bloody hardware malfunction is more likely than that going through.

As I see it, canonically, when the first megaton settlers arrived, they stopped in a large crater to take shelter from the wind and raiders. The bomb was there at this point. If we are to assume that someone did NOT pick up an armed atomic bomb and move it into an already-present crater, then:
A. The bomb fell with enough force to create a large crater, (unlikely), and also did not detonate (astronomical)
B. The bomb landed shortly after something else left the crater
C. The bomb landed at the same time as whatever created the crater, most likely in the middle of an aircraft or some such thing
D. The bomb was present at that site before the crater was made, and settled to the bottom afterwards

One thing that one should know about atomic weapons, at least in this universe:
If no one wants it to go off, it will not go off. Not if you drop it from 100,000 ft, not if you wrap it in c4 and blow it to smithereens. It will not/cannot detonate.
If Someone DOES want it to go off, it WILL go off. These things are so redundantly over-engineered it would literally take a miracle for it to be a dud.

So of the four choices, I would say the most likely scenario that would leave the bomb relatively untouched, (and thus still functionally sound), and yet in the middle of a crater 80ft deep, would be D. I would wager that that bomb was being transported, likely very heavily, to one of the many nuclear storage areas in the DC wasteland, when whatever made that crater destroyed it's caravan and freed it to roll to the bottom. All the other debris from the site would have been scavenged in the creation of the town, but that thing itself was left untouched in the pool at the bottom.

I don't know anything about the regulations for nuclear weapons in the Fallout universe either, but I know that there are differences. The Fallout universe idolizes and trivializes nukes ("sugar bombs", prevalence of the "Duck and Cover" nonsense, etc.) I think it's quite likely that they never did nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki and thus had a look at the actual effects of nuclear warfare at all. Let's also not forget that radioactivity has a different effect on living beings in the Fallout universe than in our universe - they just get funny mutations and heal it all with a rad-away, while we die of cancer and radioactivity poisoning.

Under these circumstances I find it highly unlikely that they would have any specific regulations for nuclear weapons in comparison to other weapons. And I guess we all know that weapon manufacturing corporations sell their stuff to everyone, as long as the money is right, really. Or where else do you think that some of our wold's most favourite dictatorships got their weapons from?


That said, given the Vault-Tec logo on the thing, I still think that it's more likely to be from a crashlanded US aircraft than anything else. I just couldn't explain otherwise why the Chinese didn't replace that logo with something of their own, if they had imported the nuke.