I think that the rest of the world might be in much better shape than the US for various resaons. First, the Vaults in the US were never meant to save anyone (with the exception of a few control Vaults), so what resulted in were very few survivors that could have repopulated and civilized the wasteland. Also, it's likely that the majority of nukes landed in China or the US, so much of the blast damage would have been confined in those two areas. While the fallout from the nukes would have been bad, it certainly would have been less than the two other countries. This would mean fewer mutants and less radiation that would have hindered repopulation in the rest of the world.

Also, it's very likely that other governments would have commissioned their own nuclear shelters, seeing how countries such as Russia did make their own underground shelters in the past in our world. While other governments might have done the same experiments like the US did, it's unlikely that all of them would have done so. In the US, only seventeen Vaults were control Vaults out of the 122 total. So imagine how much more development might have occurred if all 122 Vaults were actually meant to save people. Without the experimentation, it would mean that there would have been many more survivors of the nuclear holocaust.

With fewer hazards in the environment and more survivors, this would mean that the rest of the world is in much better shape than the US. Since the West Coast was able to set up a viable, working civilization with all the hazards and problems, it's not that hard to imagine the rest of the world with working governments and industry. So, what do you guys think?

I have a feeling your going to be getting a visit from Ausir sometime soon?

The whole world was nuked.

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout_intro:



http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout_2_intro:



http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Jesse_Heinig, one of the FO1 designers:



The http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Vault_13:_A_GURPS_Post-Nuclear_Adventure_timeline by Scott Campbell and Brian Freyermuth (from which all other Fallout timelines in existence are derived):



http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Emil_Pagliarulo, FO3 lead designer:



http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Tim_Cain, one of the main creators of Fallout:

I knew it.

Guilty as charged.

Huh? I'll say that your knowledge of the Fallout world is definitely better than mine, but I think you missed my point. Most of the quotes (quote number 1,2,4,6) just point to the obvious that the whole world was devastated which is pretty much common sense. No need to point that out.

Let me explain my original post. I never said that the rest of the world was untouched. What I said was that some countries would be better off than the US, not that those countries are paradise on Earth with blooming flowers and green rolling hills. While most of the Earth would have been affected by the war I would think that it's pretty safe to assume that China and the US suffered the worst (I said worst, not all) of the attacks since those two were at war when the nuclear war occurred. It's just not logical to think that the UK would launch nukes when China and the US are launching theirs (more illogical considering that nukes between China and the US needs to fire across the Pacific, which is much farther than the UK.)



This quote is irrelevant with my point because with the example of Australia it says that it needs to be "untouched" for it to be "battling" with the Enclave. Again I will say that my point was that the rest of the world might be "better off", never "untouched." If just a fraction of the nukes that landed on the US landed in say India, India would certainly be devasted that it can't extend its influence overseas even after hundreds of years, but might be in better shape than the US nonetheless.


Hmmm, I never knew that GB was the "whole world" or even a majority of "Europe" for that matter. Just because one country is worse than the US doesn't mean that all the other 190 or so countries are just as bad.

Also you never seemed to have addressed my thing on the Vaults. How vaults that were meant to save humans might have led to a better post war environment compared to a country that has vaults that were never meant to save humanity.

So I hope this cleared some things up if I wasn't being clear. That the rest of the world might be comparatively better off than the US due to the whole situation of Vaults (or lack thereof) and somewhat "less" (it would be less since the majority of nukes are probably held by China and the US anyway) damage from the bombs.

For my own two cents:

1) Even if we accept that the majority of the Vaults weren't meant to actually save people - there's still no direct evidence that any other countries even had any equivalent to Vaults, or that their shelters were any better.

2) Ausir would know more about this (which means I could be wrong,) but it was my understanding that what we had was a World War. Not just two countries trading trading nukes, but pretty much all the major superpowers duking it out. It's not just China and the US going at it, with everyone else just twiddling their thumbs.

3) If the above it true, then it leads to the assumption that any major superpower also got nuked. And if that's the case, then I don't see as how any country that got nuked would be any better off than anyone else. If anything, the US probably came out better than a lot of other places. Remember, the US had control of the last remaining natural resources - even if a couple countries did make it through relatively unscathed they still have no resources to fall back on. Think of the Mad Max scenario - Australia didn't get bombed, but they're busy fighting each other over the last remaining reserves of gas and converting pig manure into methane. (Obviously, that's not in the Fallout timeline, but I'd imagine a Fallout: Australia would present pretty much the same circumstances. For what I think would be obvious reason...)

4) It's Fallout. It's not about what's "realistic," but what fits stylistically.

5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat. Applied to videogame lore - anything not specifically delineated within the game itself or supplementary materials can be said to both be true and false at the same time. Until an in-game event, developer interview, or other supplementary material proves it one way or another - it effectively exists in a probability bubble.

(EDIT - yes, I did just use a thought experiment that points out a controversial potential flaw of quantum mechanics and applied it to game design. I think the point stands, though... The "did this happen in the game even though there's been no mention of it" always reminds of me of "if a tree falls in the woods and no one's there to hear, does it still make a sound?" )

Well, it's pretty logical to think that other countries would have created their own fallout shelters as in this real timeline. It's just not probable that countries would sit there and wait for the nukes to fall, and not make any preparations. And if they did make fallout shelters it's likely that they would not have made them experiments like the Vaults in the US. My point was that a few more survivors (larger gene pool, speciality base, labor, etc.) could do a lot in a post-apocalyptic setting.


Yeah, the war was a "World War" with all nuclear capable countries launching. However, it would seem likely that the majority of the nukes would have been launched by the US and China due to the fact that they were at war. While other countries would have panicked and set off their own nukes, it's likely that they weren't "official" launches, but panicked launches made by technicians who were in charge of the nukes. I think this is likely because the prime minister of Britain would realise that there would be no reason to think that nukes from the US or China is approaching them, due to the simple reason that the the nukes between the two countries need to go through the Pacific, which is as far as you can get from GB. However, some stupid technician could launch nukes, but these would be isolated incidents and smaller in quantity than the official launches of China and the US.


Some countries can get by better, since suffering from a few nukes is easily recoverable (Japan in our world). My general point is that while a nuked country would still be devastated, five nukes is much better than say a hundred nukes. Also you have to remember that there is a limited amount of uranium and that a single bomb takes millions of dollars to create and maintain. In our world China "only" has 180-240 nuclear weapons due to the cost and the general lack of uranium in that country. This situation is probably true in the FO universe because it split around WWII. In WWII, creating the first atomic bomb took 2 billion dollars (or 24 billion dollars today) to create. This would mean that any nuclear capable country in the Fallout universe and this universe would have the exact same problems and obstacles that it needs to overcome. Also this is supported in game considering how nuclear technology was very expensive and only a few individuals could afford it (look at the timeline in the wiki). So this would mean that other nuclear capable countries would have less of an impact than the nuclear war between China and the US.

This brings us to the second point in #3. While I haven't played the first two Fallouts, it's my impression that they didn't use a huge amount of oil or steel except in isolated areas. So, I would guess that a lot of the world would be on a equal footing in terms of natural resources. And, if the NCR could be created in the enviroment with few resources, it's not a stretch to think that there are other new states emerging in other parts of the world.

Hmm? I realise that this game isn't suppose to be realistic, but what does that have to do with what's happenning to the rest of the world?


I know that :hehe: However, what I put in the first post was what I thought was logical. For example your anology about the tree wouldn't make for a good debate because a tree would logically make a sound no matter what. As long as we use logic, this topic is pretty debatable. The fact that there isn't a in-game event, developer interview, etc. just means that we can have a discussion without someone bringing up a wiki article.

Yes, but World War implies more than two countries fighting it out. I don't see why China (or their allies) couldn't have targetted say, Great Britain, for example. Like I said - World War implies a War on more than just the one front. Look at World War 2, for example. That wasn't fought between just 2 countries. The war covered most of the world at some point or another. It impacted pretty much every continent. Ditto for a hypothetical nuclear World War.

Maybe China didn't launch on Great Britain. But I'd think it would be more than likely that one of their allies might have. Say, for example, China was allied with Germany (just hypothetically,) and Great Britain was allied with the US. Germany would, by the very virtue of being allied, be compelled to strike on Great Britain (or vice versa.)

It's not just China and the US launching nukes. It's everyone against each other. At the very least pre-emptively.

The War was fought due to dwindling oil reserves. (Again, Ausir would know more than me - I thought I remembered coming across something stating that NATO was mad at the US for refusing to share their remaining sources.) Sure, NCR was able to make some growth. I don't see why other countries wouldn't be able to do the same. But that doesn't mean that they'd be better set up.

Another matter is that even if a country didn't get nuked to the degree the US did, it doesn't mean they didn't suffer from a greater deal of conventional fighting. Europe, for example. Even if the point could be made that they didn't suffer as much the nuclear strikes, there's still chemical warfare and airstrikes to take into account.

Because when it comes down to it; whenever the game actually does reveal more of the world, it's going to be more about what they feel is going to best fit the tone they're going for. Going from the US where everyone is just crawling out of the rubble to another part of the world where things aren't that bad - I don't see that happening. So whatever we decide is mose "likely," even if we could hypothetically agree that rest of the world is doing pretty good for itself - it's going to end up getting overwritten by whatever the "official" lore ends up being. (And I'm pretty sure that's not going to be Fallout: Everywhere Else in the World isn't that Bad... )

First, your hypothetical situation doesn't work due to the fact that the war (before the nukes) was fought between China and the US alone (or at least that's my impression by reading the wiki--it mentions the war as the "sino-American war" not World War III). So, there is no reason that China or the US would have nuked other countries other than the ones they were fighting against. Which would mean that nukes from other countries would be those that resulted from technical error or panic. This, of course, would be much more limited than a official strike which would be comprised of most nukes in a certain country.

Also, just participating in it doesn't mean full participation in the war. For example, while Brazil did participate in WWII, but it "only" lost 2000 men out of 40 million citizens compared to the 567,000 deaths out of 41 million citizens in France. In the same way, one country could just have sent one nuke to have "participated" in this war, but it's impact would have been insignificant to the thousands sent by the US. As such, its possible that some countries would have suffered fewer nuclear strikes per area than the US or China.


What I pointed out were some few advantages that other countries would have in the PO setting, such as better fallout shelters compared to the Vaults in the US and less nukes hitting them. While this might be a small advantage, when humanity is driven close to extinction, every single bit would go a very long way.


Since the war was only 2 hours long, I would assume that there were very little to no conventional fighting.


I don't know... I think it might be interesting to see some kind of invasion from Europe or even China. This would fit in the paranoia of the 50s and thus into the atomosphere of the FO universe. Of course, until they reveal how the rest of the world is doing, we can still keep on arguing

I was starting to write a post about how I could see it thematically working, after some thought, but that I still had some issues with the idea of another more powerful country invading. But there's still one issue that we've been completely overlooking despite it's obviousness. I think it's a pretty big factor, as well.

The name of the game is "Fallout."

The big scare of a mass nuclear exchange isn't just getting blown up by a big bomb. It's the lasting effects from all that radiation. Messed-up weather patterns, nuclear winter, etc. The primary and defining theme of the post-apocalyptic genre isn't so much a matter of where the nukes hit, but how many there were. The idea is that the environmental effects would completely eradicate most of the life on the planet, not just a few specific countries. That's an impact on a global scale. If if you're a country that wasn't in any way involved with the exchange, you're still going to suffer the effects of the War.

In the world of Fallout - radiation is based on a 1950's understanding of it. Nowadays, we know that a place like Chernobyl can come back after a relatively short period of time, that people can live perfectly well in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. In Fallout, it doesn't work like that. Even 200 years after the War, most places are still suffering the effects of massive background radiation and the effect that has had on the environment. And that's global.

In the world of Fallout, I could very well see that even if a place like Great Britain wasn't actually bombed; that it's still surrounded by a toxic ocean, it's crops have withered and died, everything's mutated, etc. Maybe the War lasted 2 hours, but the effects would last much longer. Civil uprisings, mass famines, loss of communication, collapse of the economy, the breakdown of government, etc.

Not all post-apocalyptic disaster situations have to do with nuclear war, after all. There's plenty of stories where mass famine, global warming, disease, etc have produced the same end-result that we see in Fallout. They might have more buildings standing, (what weren't torn down in the society upheaval and anarchy following the failure of their government,) but it's not going to mean they have less problems to overcome or will bounce back at a faster rate.

Realistically (at least as far as is likely in Fallout game) I think it's more likely that any other country that the game deals with is going to be just as badly hurt as the US. It could just be for different reasons.

If you examine the Fallout 2 intro again as Ausir posted you'll see:

1) Continents were swallowed in flames
2) Humanity was almost extinguished

Fallout 1 intro:
1) Most of the planet reduced to cinders

That alone is enough to allow you to understand the nuclear exchange wasn't between the US and China alone. The Middle East had seen a limited nuclear exchange before the big one, the resource wars devastated Europe and the Middle East. Finally all countries fired off their nukes, probably at their own enemies. It was a full blown nuclear armageddon.

No other country had a Vault system (Just like they didn't have Power Armors), and until it is stated otherwise in a future game, the best protection they had against nuclear war was the conventional protection (Like fallout shelters) which were predominant in the cold war era; most countries didn't even have these either.

I would venture to say that the rest of the world is about as bad a shape as the US and some could be even worse.

How do you know that only the US and China were at war? Just because we don't know much about other conflicts doesn't mean they weren't there - they just weren't important to the story so far.

The great war was only 2 hours long and was everyone firing there missles (MAD), but there was years of fighting before hand all across the globe in the resource wars, europe would be deciamted with all the fighting between the EC, the middle east would be decimated with the prior war with europe, africa would probably be invaded for its resources by someone, and some of south america was invaded by america for there resources. so even before the great war the rest of the world would have been in worse shape than the US. (and that dosnt even take into account the new plague)

You gotta remember to the US took over Canada some countries might think they would be next and also Nuke the US and the Allies of US. Or inanother scenario they might not want to be taken over by china and decided to strike when the countries are at their weakest.

I think it safe to assume that other countries are in more or less the same state, with the only differences being the lack of FEV mutation (so no Super Mutants, deathclaw, etc) and differing radiation counts. If the nukes didnt get them, the fall of international trade and civil society did.

Deathclaws aren't an FEV mutation, they were chameleons genetically modified with DNA of various species.

Allright, everything I know of about FO that isn't mentioned in FO3 is from the wiki, so I am by no means an authority; but I'll put my two caps in.

Allright. From 2052 to 2077 is the resource wars; effectively what happens is that the Oil Reserves fail, causing mass-panic. Small nations immedately go bankrupt. The UN, the major peackeeping orginization, fails due to this crisis. What ends up happening is a conventional (possibly hot, i.e. usage of tactical nuke) free-for-all war for about 25 years. Information about the FEV is leaked; any nation that wants to can now probably create their own strain. Close to the end, China invades Alaska for it's oil, US annexes Canada (a process that actually started in 2067) and deploys the T-51s to reclaim Alaska, and then pushes into China. About that time, the two hours of nuclear bombardment begins.

Nobody knows who fired first; but you can bet that China and the US traded Nukes. Other nuclear nations detect a large amount of bombers/ICBMs suddenly appear on their radars, and in a panic, start launching their own nukes (remember; Nukes were widespread in the FO timeline; the anti-nuke movement had not occured, or had limited sucess.) What happens is that nuclear nations are turned into blasted, burning areas. Nonuclear nations, presumably severely weakened by years of conventional combat, can't handle the resulting nuclear winter (which kills crops and drops acidic rain) and collapse. Survivors of the war start a looting rampage, which may have been worse than the initial conflict (One of the residents in Underworld says she remebers the looting and killing in DC immedately after the bomb drop.) Radiation sickness starts sometime later, furthering plunging the survivors into a stuggle for survival. Most plant life has died off; and since plants are the basis of the food chain, so do most animals that survie the engagement.

Years later, some people who survived the nuclear engagment start to show signs of Ghoulification. Some of these people go mad, becoming the first Feral Ghouls, and other manage to keep their mental faculties intact. The nuclear dust from the bombardment finally settles to the ground; the sun is seen for the first time since 2077. Because the dust covered the globe, it settles everywhere, the worlds oceans, lakes, steams, etc. are hopelessly irradiated. Any areas that miraculusly avoided the radioactive particle spread from the wind are finally irradiated.

Keeping all that in mind, I don't see how any other place is better off than the US. What we have is a complete loss of civilization, and without a method to get a stable food/water supply (remember, all water is irradiated) any attempts to re-start civilization as it was is doomed to failure. Of course, we have groups such as Megaton, Rivet City, and NCA that are formed from mutual protection, rather than from farming (which is one of the things that caused civilization as we know it to start.)

to the OP: give it up, they wont budge without severe evidence from the original devs that some lone small nation was kinda spared from the nukes (like just 1 nuke to their capitol, rest untouched by nukes but fell into savagery/looting or widespread unrest.)

i would guess large areas in Siberia or Island/northern Scandinavia would be untouched by nukes, since you dont target large empty forests/tundras but concentrate the bombardment on their major cities.

Actually, I was willing to at least see the potential for some areas to have come through relatively unscathed. But there's still the matter of the Fallout and successive nuclear winter to take into account. You don't need to get bombed to suffer the worst effect of a nuclear apocalypse.

Like I said above - the game is called "Fallout."

Actually, there was no nuclear winter in the Fallout world, because that theory did not exist in the 1950s.

Well, that's true to a degree. But radioactive fallout itself in a lot those pulp sci-fi novels is large enough threat without the inclusion of a nuclear winter. (ie, regardless of whether or not you have ash blocking out the sun, you still have the harbinger of radiation killing off crops, mutating animals, and sterilizing the oceans. That was a well-established scenario by that time, in literature.)

While the Theory of Nuclear Winter didn't exist at that point... there is clear evidence of it in the FO world...

After all, I wouldn't have mentioned the Nuclear Winter bit if it wasn't mentioned (I belive in the Fallout Bible) that the skies were dark for years, and that during this period an acid-like rain fell.

It all happened for just a short period after the War, though. There was no long-lasting nuclear winter.

Ah... my mistake.

I respectfully withdraw my comments regarding Nuclear Winter.