A couple days ago I was playing some Fallout and my friends asks me what kind of nuclear bombs China sent to D.C. That left me speechless because I started to think. Isn't D.C the most important city in the U.S? Wouldn't Chinese bombs from the future completely flatten D.C? How come most of the buildings are intact? If anyone has some opinions on this I would like to here them.

Well, the most common theory is it was a mix of Nuclear bombs like Megatons, and a few carpet bombing runs with missles and firebombing. I mean, you dont have to level a city like Hiroshima was, just make it unfunctionable or near to unfunctionable, and Washington D.C. is at MAYBE 10% Functionality if that.

I figured it was a combination of Fat Man and Little Boy type nukes combined with ICBMs.

None... USA being the greatest country in the world probably had SDI and blocked the bigger missiles.

By the way.. I was joking about the SDI part.

China probably wasted most of its missiles wasting the other parts of the world and did not have enough missiles to level DC.

Maybe the USA was nuking China and China's missile launchers were all destroyed?

we flattened china and took over canada

For some reason all the atomic weapons in the Fallout universe were remarkably low yield. Way less advanced then all the other tech.

One hit the White House and wiped it out completely, but the damage didn't extend much beyond the White House grounds themselves.

I believe I read somewhere that most of the radiation and "fallout" from the war wasn't actually from the bombs that were dropped, it was from the massive number of atomic cars and other vehicles/devices that were in use.

That settles it. The war was fought with welfare nukes, thats why it looks like acts of terrorism rather than nuclear warfare!

Actually Canada was annexed and not taken by force.

The bombs were of very low yield, I believe, but were dropped in mass. Though, if a bomb directly hits the ground, it won't do as much damage as the ground absorbs all the energy -- that explains why Megaton's bomb didn't have a huge effect and why most of Pennsylvania Avenue remained unscathed despite the White House taking a nuke directly.

And when you look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the strong, sturdy buildings weren't actually knocked down, which explains why most of the D.C. structures are still standing. A lot of the houses and such in the two Japanese cities were made of wood and the like, which is obviously going to be destroyed easily.

Their technology is 67 years more advanced than us, we probably can't imagine what kind they were.

There is a case to be made for a form of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_bomb, with it's trade off of more personnel killing radiation in exchange for less immediate destructive power.

But Carol says that the city was on fire for weeks, maybe even months.

Fire has little to do with a nuclear bomb. Once the fires started, without a Fire Department, they'd burn till the fuel ran out.

If I remember correctly, there are 3 big effects with thermonuclear devices:

- Flash ignition of everything within direct view of the detonation point (out to a certain radius). So lots of burns, lots of little fires that then become big fires as they merge together. Big problem in Hiroshima/Nagasaki due to the widespread use of paper and wood in construction.

- Shockwave of the blast. The reason that you detonate slightly above ground is because the reflection of the wave off the ground will merge with the wave traveling through the air. So you get a bigger shockwave at the air/ground interface due to the echo.

- Radiation... ghouls everywhere! (not funny :shakehead: except in the Fallout universe)

(Little Boy was 13-18kt, Fat Man was more like 21kt. The DC bombs in the Fallout 3 universe would need to be down around 2-5kt.)

That's why something like a Neutron Bomb makes sense. The bomb doesn't utilize the Neutron particles for explosive power, so the explosion is about one-tenth the power of a comparable atomic bomb, but the massive radiation dose is designed to kill people in shelters or IN ARMOR (tanks for us, power armor for them). Also, the massive radiation dose is a very short term thing, it doesn't appreciably add to the fallout.

It's good for strategically taking out targets and eliminating population, but not destroying resources in a world that's resource starved already from a long-term war.

Too bad for those involved that the large number of other nuclear devices, and the FEV, more than eliminated any benefits of the neutron bombs. Plus both sides lost (obvious and inevitable unless you're crazy as hell) so no one could take advantage of the resources that were saved.

The answer is so simple I am shocked, shocked I tell you, that you guys are unaware of the Chinese proclivity for Interior Decorating

And... anyone knows that first class interior decorating calls for MARBLE counter tops. What are most of DC's buildings and monuments made out of... Drum Roll... marble of course.

Okay, okay my goofy sense of humor got the best of me, but the real reason is even more simple than the foregoing. If the Chinese had completely flattened DC you kill off all those neat DC Quests!!!!

Right?

:)

Wrong, the D.C. area was the only location in the world which was fully nuclear powered and upgraded to the newest technologies. The main cause of the recourses wars and eventualy the Nuclear Holocaust, was the nearing total depletion of petroleum, with china having no fancy nuclear technology at all, triggering their invasion of Alaska. The U.S. as well, even with their recently developed fission batteries and nuclear powered cars, didn't have the industry or recourses to distribute these technologies throughout the country, leading them to the brink of complete economic demise, which forced the U.S. into the same conflict as all the other powers in the world. As for the Nuclear bombs, it seems unlikely to me the Chinese wouldn't put an high effort into ensuring to decapitate the U.S. chain of command, focussing a substantial Nuclear arsenal on leveling the D.C. area. Fallout wikia describes the average yield of a Nuclear Warhead in the Fallout universe to be considerably lower than in our own, yet much higher in numbers, even so, their yields amounted to about 200-750 Kilotons, meaning that even one direct hit would have completely destroyed most of Washington D.C. There are only two logical explanations to this, likely the U.S. government had deployed large amounts of anti-aircraft and anti-missile installations, hindering the Chinese - which would have to fly over pretty much all of the U.S. first, or use ICBM's over the Northpole - into reaching the U.S. The other explanation would simply be that the game designers felt it would be a waste to reduce Washignton to smoldering ruins, rather than to leave most of it intact, apart from it's natural decay.

Reason so many building stand in FO3 is because the game would be very boring without them. The other Fallouts cover very large areas. Cities and towns are hundreds of miles apart with nothing but wasteland in between. FO3 can't be that big so everything is alot closer together. So more buildings are in the game. It's stupid to use science or even fallout science to explain why buildings still stand in the number seen in FO3.

Nuclear bombs even ones from WW2 can destroy a city. The Bombs in the Fallout universe did destroy the world and most cities. Fallout two intro says "Spears of nuclear fire rianed down from the skies" this make a case for ICBM. The Bombs seen in FO3 are the result of the FO3 Devs going way overbored with the 1950's style

No, the US didn't. It says nowhere in lore that China was 'flattened'. It's possible that China is still a functioning society with working government. It's possible that there's absolutely nothing left. We don't know.
They didn't take over Canada, either. Canada was annexed, not invaded.


..No, don't even try. Every country has its flaws, America being one of the top-rankings.

Chill out man, he said they were jokes.

I hate it when people compete about which country is best. There is no such thing as a best country.

I disagree, who WOULDNT think a country devoid of most life, law and civility and are eager to gun you down for no reason beyond being a psychopath is the best country on Earth? COMMUNISTS

...
..What?

I'm not talking about countries in the game.. I'm talking about countries in real life....

The communist thing was a bit unnecessary. I'm a follower of socialism.

We know this:

"War, war never changes. The Romans waged war to gather slaves and wealth. Span built an empire from its lust for gold and territory. Hitler shaped a battered Germany into and economic super power but war never changes. In the twenty first century war was still waged over the resources that could be acquired. Only this time the spoils of war were also its weapons. Petroleum and Uranium, for these resources China would invade Alaska, the US would annex Canada and the European Commonwealth would dissolve into quarrelling bickering nation states bent on controlling the last remaining resources on earth.

In 2077 the storm of world war had come again. In two brief hours most of the planet was reduce to cinders and from the ashes a new civilization would struggle to arise.


"War. War never changes. The end of the world occurred pretty much as we predicted. To many humans not enough space or resources to go around. The details are trivial and pointless, the reasons as alway purely human ones. The earth was nearly wiped clean of life. A great cleansing an atomic spark struck by human hands, quickly raged out of control. Spears of nuclear fire rianed down from the skies. Continents were swallowed in flames and fell beneath the boiling oceans. Humanity was almost extinguished. Their spirits becoming part of the back ground radiation that blanketed the earth. A quiet darkness fell across the planet lasting many years"

This means there is no country left whole even China. Chances are China was bombed really bad. During the Great War, every one that had nukes used them. China being an enemy of both USA and USSR would have been hit by a good amount of both Super Powers nuclear arsenals.