On this Fallout Day we ask: who dropped the first bomb?
10.23.2024
By Dave Tach, Contributor
“War,” the narrator says. “War never changes.”
Nor does that line change. It’s repeated with the bland apathy of mundane facts—water is wet, the sky is blue, war never changes—in the opening cinematics of every major Fallout entry since the 1997 original. A narrator always reminds us that Fallout’s world is one of conquest, of resource scarcity, of warring tribal factions—some small enough to be denoted by the dozens and some large enough to measure in the millions. Then as now, the narrator always reminds us that war is the engine that powers human avarice, whether in the form of Nazi Germany’s unquenchable thirst for power or colonial Spain’s lust for gold. Thus has it been in human history, and thus will it be in future Fallout history.
In that fictional 21st century, humanity waged war like we always did, but we used different pretexts—petroleum and uranium became the fuel for the fire of war. Before Fallout began, China invaded Alaska in a bid to capture those resources. The United States annexed Canada. The European Commonwealth descended into bickering and squabbling, as resources ran out and everyone scrambled to control what little remained. The world, in other words, descended into madness.
War may not have changed, but it escalated with cataclysmic consequences. It was Saturday, Oct. 23, 2077 when global thermonuclear war changed the world forever. Oceans boiled. Continents burned. The short Great War’s nuclear holocaust took about two hours to wipe most of humanity and human progress from the map.
Fallout almost always looks at the aftermath, focusing on the few survivors both inside and outside of the series’ Vault-Tec shelters—bastions of ostensible hope for what little humanity was left.
But what was that bizarre retrofuturist world like? And what happened on those last days in a sort of 1950s American sitcom version of reality that got transported a century into the future? What happened on the day that the bombs flew and fell and reduced centuries of progress and civilization to rubble and barbarism?
We know that the world went mad. But it had also survived that long thanks to MAD, the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction, which says that one nuclear nation attacking another would lead to the destruction of both, thus serving as an effective deterrent. It worked—until it didn’t.
So who pushed the button that ended humanity as we know it? Who started dropping bombs?
That’s been an enduring mystery since the original game’s release in 1997—one that the games have deftly skirted for decades.
“The end of the world occurred pretty much as we’d predicted,” Fallout 2’s narrator said first in 1998. “The details are trivial and pointless. The reasons, as always, purely human ones.” In other words: don’t worry about it. The details don’t really matter.
Yet we might be closer to discovering those details and finding an answer than ever before. The answer might upend a longstanding theory, amend the original plan, and ultimately depend on a real-world exchange of the Fallout franchise’s nuclear football.
The China theory
One of the oldest theories about who dropped the first bomb points Vault Boy’s finger toward China.
We know from the first moments of the first game that there was a sequence of aggression. First China took over Alaska to capture its resources, like petroleum and uranium. Then the United States annexed Canada, presumably as a way to hold them back. In this scenario, Chinese aggressors fired first, and the United States retaliated.
Fallout fans and internet sleuths have combed the wastelands, piecing together a light dusting of details sprinkled throughout the games which arguably lend credence to the China theory. For example, it seems that the first nukes hit the U.S. at 9:42 EDT on Fallout Day, and then the U.S. retaliated. But where did those nukes come from? And were these even the first to be fired?
Fallout Creator Tim Cain said in an interview last year that, from his perspective, China were the aggressors. And he knows why they did it, too.
“And also, we don’t come across as good,” Cain said, referring to the United States. “The reason [the United States] got nuked is [that] bio weapons were illegal, and somehow China found out we were doing FEV [the Forced Evolutionary Virus, which is responsible for many of the series’ mutations]. And they're like, ‘You have to stop it!’ and we went ‘OK,’ and all we did is move it. All we did was move it over.”
Hard to be more definitive than the words of the guy who quite literally set that signature Fallout tone, a mixture of absurdist humor and thermonuclear horror that has endured for the better part of three decades.
Except…
Cain was the main creative force at developer Interplay Productions, serving as Fallout’s Designer, its Producer and a Lead Programmer. He was intimately involved with Fallout 2, which was released a year later in 1998. Clearly, his thoughts and input are valuable. In an alternate universe, they might be canon, but ultimately the franchise took a different path.
In 2004, Bethesda acquired the Fallout rights from Interplay. Fallout 3 was released in 2008, a decade after Fallout 2, developed in-house at Bethesda. Two years later, in 2010, developer Obsidian Entertainment released Fallout: New Vegas, with Bethesda serving as publisher.
These were new games from new developers, but they were not reboots. Bethesda didn’t nuke and pave over the originals. They continued the story that began at Interplay and the mystery about who dropped the bomb endured through Fallout 3, Fallout 4, and Fallout 76, as well as offshoots like Fallout Shelter.
For all we know, Bethesda could have nuked Cain’s original intent in favor of a new idea. It’s perfectly plausible, given that the scenario he outlined in 2023 was never canonized in the games he worked on. We don’t know. It remains a mystery, and the essence of a mystery is that it’s unsolved.
Until recently…or maybe not.
The Vault-Tec theory
Fallout is just the latest in a long line of transmedia properties where a video game franchise made the leap to the TV or big screen, but a couple of things make it stand out. First, it’s been widely well-received, thanks in no small part to Walton Goggins’ portrayal of Cooper Howard / The Ghoul.
Second, it’s entirely canon—as in every bit as canon as Fallout 4 or any other game. Bethesda worked closely with the TV team, with studio Game Director Todd Howard serving as an executive producer. Even Prime Video press releases tout that continuity, saying that “the series is an original story based on Fallout that will be part of the canon of the games.”
A significant part of the story of the Fallout TV show takes place before Oct. 23, 2077, the day that the mushroom clouds rose and cities fell. It gives us a detailed look at Vault-Tec, the mad company that created the series’ iconic underground vaults, where people hunkered down when the bombs dropped.
In fact, the focus of the first season is arguably the story of who dropped the bomb and why. And it’s not the Chinese.
Without giving too much away, a scene toward the end of the season—which was already filled with glimpses of bizarre Vault-Tec employee behavior and human experimentation—shows its embrace of a brand of amoral capitalism and unhinged fiduciary responsibility.
“A nuclear event would be a tragedy, but also an opportunity,” a Vault-Tec employee says at a meeting of senior company figures. “Perhaps the greatest opportunity in history, because when we are the only ones left, there will be no one left to fight. A true monopoly. This is our chance to make war obsolete, because in our current societal configuration, which took shape without intentional guidance, we have friction, we have conflict, and we have war…and war never changes.”
Vault-Tec knows that war never changes, but at least they can profit from it. They have more than enough hubris, as the show consistently makes clear, to believe that they can engineer a new world where they’d rule the post-apocalyptic roost. They have all the motive in the world to destroy it and rebuild in Vault Boy’s image. And their vaults themselves are a vast and crass network of social and scientific experiments acting as the seeds from which their new world will spring.
Is that definitive proof? Nope. But it might as well be a flashing neon sign blinking "guilty."
Then again, maybe not. Co-Showrunner Graham Wagner told GQ that all may not be what it seems.
“Well, we have more story to tell,” Wagner said. “I would just not treat anything as definitive because, again, everything that we see is very subjective. That scene occurred. But what occurs between then and the actual bombs falling…there's more exciting stuff planned between that moment and the last moment, I guess I should say.”
Was it China? America? Vault-Tec? The apocalypse may never know. Perhaps the salient point is that it doesn’t really matter, as the games have been telling us all along. All that really matters is that just about every powerful entity had a motive to strike first in a terribly broken world—a world of conquest, of resource scarcity, and of warring tribal factions. All we really know for sure is that war never changes.