How Accurate Is Fallout In Its Representation of Post-Nuclear War?
I’ve always felt an affinity with the Fallout game series, somehow the franchise has continued to resonate with me despite being a highly stylised post-apocalyptic alternate version of 1950s America set in the future.
What can I say? I enjoy the brown, arid, dusty Wasteland with its mutated inhabitants and homemade nuclear weaponry. However, if we ground the series in reality for a moment, I often wonder how it would match up. Would a nuclear war and the fallout that followed lead to brown and ochre tones as far as the eye could see? Which animals would mutate? And would I really find a canine companion as loyal and invincible as Dogmeat?
I wanted to attempt to answer some of these questions and more, so I did some research and read a few scientific studies, of which there are many. After all, numerous studies began in the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 6th and 9th August 1945 respectively and continued long into the 1960s only to regain traction again in the 1980s.
Ultimately, no one truly knows what the world would look like or resemble after a full-scale nuclear war. Though, many of these studies explored what would be left behind after a thermo-nuclear blast. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the US government were extremely interested in nuclear fallout and the defence department working alongside the Atomic Energy Commission produced multiple in-depth studies.
Their findings uncovered that the fallout of a nuclear attack was just as much a threat as the attack itself. This is because plant and animal life were discovered to have different susceptibilities to the ionising radiation emitted by nuclear bombs.
So what would happen to us, post nuclear blast? Despite humans not possessing much resistance to radiation, we’re not the ones that would be the most affected suggesting that the Fallout series’ Ghouls or Super Mutants are entirely fictional which is quite frankly, a relief.
Other mammals, especially those we use as cattle and livestock would suffer the results more obviously. This means that the games’ two headed Brahmin may well be close to the truth, though you definitely wouldn’t want to chow down on an actual Brahmin steak. We may have better resistance than our bovine friends but we’re not immune! Speaking of mammals…do we even know how we’d classify a Deathclaw? Because, I’d really hate to know that they could exist, even hypothetically.
Lifeforms that would thrive in the aftermath are insects and arachnids such as ants, cockroaches and scorpions meaning that Radscorpions, Radroaches and Fallout : New Vegas’ Giant Fire Ants are definitely based on non-fiction.
As for the Wasteland depicted in the games, it’s extremely likely that plant life and trees would be massively affected and die off. In Tennessee in the 1960s, a small nuclear reactor was built for research and development however, something went wrong during its construction and the nuclear material wasn’t shielded properly.
This meant that the reactor had begun emitting ionising radiation, scientists noticed that in the area around the laboratory, pine trees were beginning to die of as faster rate than normal. Biologists and ecologists then found that soft wood trees are more susceptible than hardwood trees meaning in a society made up of timber, many of our structures and buildings would become vulnerable. This is what happens when you skimp on building costs or buy all of your furniture from Ikea.
Is your furniture susceptible to radiation? Perhaps you could try and barter the price down next time you’re shopping for a coffee table. So, because most of our building material is susceptible, what would we rebuild with? In Fallout 4 and Fallout 76, players craft items and build settlements but would these really hold up in the post-apocalyptic aftermath? The short answer is probably not.
Unless you were building with hardwood or concrete (which although isn’t as vulnerable, still is) or lead, eventually everything would deteriorate. Incidentally, if you look up the images from the reactor with faulty shielding, the area actually does resemble the Fallout games.
With shelter covered, what about sustenance? What will we be able to eat and drink? Well, you’ll be pleased to know that a 1957 published US government study which was part of a bigger study called Operation Teapot found that bottled beer and soda would in fact be safe to drink, the further away from the blast the better though even though close to the blast were found to be only slightly radioactive and while the taste was affected, it wasn’t that bad. Yep…they actually had someone drink it.
So there’s some truth to the idea that we’d all be enjoying Nuka-Cola or Sunset Sarsaparillas. What about food though? Well for starters, unless you’re lucky enough to live near some crops that didn’t get destroyed in the blast then you can forget fresh produce.
Most of our food these days is transport based and with railway lines and roads destroyed and little fuel available for planes, crops wouldn’t be able to be transported where there was high demand and it was most in need, like a city for example. Perhaps a reason to take up gardening and become self-sufficient that isn’t just a result of reaching retiring age? That said with insects being least vulnerable to radiation, any crops you did have could be wiped out.
And what about the economy? Well, without the systems in place money would well and truly be worthless and we’d definitely have to result to a bartering system of some kind or utilise a new replacement for money, which is why Bottlecaps in the Fallout franchise might be close to the truth.
Perhaps the closest we can get to understanding what a nuclear aftermath might be like is Chernobyl in eastern Ukraine. As the humans that once resided there left, the ecosystem and flora in the area has flourished. Perhaps, the Fallout games are more inaccurate than we might imagine. Or perhaps it’s the absence of human life which has aided the ecosystem meaning that post nuclear war, with humans gone the Earth might become a thriving ecosystem of plant and bug life.
It seems that overall the Fallout series is grounded in many ways with much of the nuclear research from the 50s onwards and in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear event perhaps it comes close but because the franchise is actually set hundreds of years after 2077 and 25 years after in Fallout 76, it’s more likely that the world would look very different to how it’s portrayed. Mostly, with evolved plant life having benefitted from the decline of us filthy humans.
Ultimately, the thing about studies into the fallout of a nuclear reaction is that none can say with any certainty what would actually happen, they can only predict. Without it happening, we will never know…and let’s hope we never live to find out, unless we’re virtually gathering codes in Fallout 76 in order to detonate a fictional atom bomb, that is.
Here are some links to some useful research I found (I read others but felt they might be too heavy for a casual read - if you're interested though, drop me a message):
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