Film Theory: The Fallout Nukes are a LIE

The world of Fallout is a lie. The irradiated desert full of people fighting to survive is not what would happen if the bombs we see in the show Fallout fell in the real world. But the reality is much worse. Put on your Pip-Boys, loyal theorists, as we explore the real consequences of this great war. Hello Internet, welcome to Film Theory, the show that doesn't want to set the world on fire, it just wants to light a flame in your heart. Believe it or not, while I love movies, I'm also a lifelong gamer. After all, I started editing for Game Theory.

And the games I love the most? Role-playing games like Fallout. No joke, I had a cat named after the game director at Fallout developer Bethesda. RIP Todd Howard, you were a good cat. If you don't know, Fallout takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where nuclear war has destroyed most of human civilization. The few survivors have gathered into makeshift cities and raiding bands that plunder the wasteland, or inside vaults designed to keep their residents safe. And all of that is wrapped in a nice bow of retro-future aesthetics, dark humor and exaggerated violence. This is a franchise that pulls no punches.

So why are we talking about this game franchise on Film Theory today? Well, I was excited and terrified to hear that they were adapting the series into a TV show on Amazon Prime. Would it live up to the franchise's highest heights or would it be broken and wacky? Well, I'm happy to say that the Fallout show is more Last of Us than Halo, a faithful adaptation that features the same brutal comedy and social commentary that makes Fallout so special. All while using art straight from the games and also making a pretty good TV show. I have to say I had a really good feeling about this one when I was proudly proclaimed by the studio that brought us free two-day shipping.

It just feels so... Fallout. Oh my god, Lee. Leeward! Are you stealing another one of my franchises? No no no no no! Get out of here, Tom. This is mine. I was there when Fisto told me to take the position, when there were cars falling from the sky in Fallout 4. I've spent more time modding these games than some people playing, Tom. Come back and be mad when I steal Minecraft or something, I don't know. In Los Angeles, while most of the Fallout show takes place two centuries after the end of the world, the opening scene decides to do something a little different, starting instead on the day the bombs fell.

Here, one of our protagonists, Cooper Howard, sees the explosions all over the Los Angeles skyline. Desperate for safety, Cooper and his daughter head to the Hollywood Hills. It is a chilling scene. Los Angeles has more or less disappeared from the map. Neighbors and friends turn against each other. Everyone is running for their lives. But, of course, I wouldn't be a very good theorist if scenes like this didn't also spark my scientific curiosity. After all, Cooper and his daughter are very close to some of these explosions, and it got me thinking: could they survive this? Would Cooper have had the chance to move on from this day and bond with the other characters on the show?

I just had to dig into it, and after crunching the numbers, well, the answer surprised me and will blow this program wide open. See loyal theorists, if you watch this scene, you will find that the world of this show, which sets up the entire Fallout franchise, is a lie. Most likely, none of these characters in the opening scene would have survived, including Cooper, and few of the future characters would have had the chance to be born. The consequences of Fallout would have been much worse than even this series could have imagined. So, folks, put on your power armor, we're heading out into the wasteland to find out why.

To start, let's catch up on what we're talking about here. First of all, the show is actually set in the same canon as the games, which in itself is a challenge since most games have multiple endings, but that's a headache for another day. Regardless, the show also has the distinction of being among some of the oldest and most recent content we see in the Fallout timeline. Yes, although the main events of the show take place in 2296, around nine years after the events of Fallout 4, there are numerous flashbacks taking place in or before 2077 and the Great War that destroyed the world.

And while this isn't the first time we've seen bombs drop on the franchise, it's the best look at the devastating event the series has offered to date. So now we can do all kinds of interesting things, like finding out exactly how bad these bombs would have been for the world, and specifically for Cooper. Let's start by finding out exactly where the bombs landed in this scene. This part of the show takes place in Los Angeles and we get a nice aerial shot as three nuclear weapons are detonated over the city. This right here gives us all the information we need to identify these explosions, all thanks to this building.

That there, in the corner of this shot, is the Griffith Observatory, a famous place that you can recognize from Terminator to La La Land to Grand Theft Auto V. Using this, we can hop on Google Earth and line it up with the program, letting us know that We're here somewhere in the mountains north of Hollywood. You may also notice that unlike the show, there are no skyscrapers here in this part of Los Angeles in the real world. But this would still make sense given that this part of the Fallout timeline takes place 50 years after the present, and that the Fallout world split from ours shortly after World War II, so we can forgive this little snippet. artistic.

License taken with the Los Angeles skyline. Anyway, using this information, we can determine approximately where the epicenter of these three explosions is. The closest to Cooper is just southeast of the observatory, putting Ground Zero right here in Hollywood. The second explosion occurred even further southeast, located right in the center of Los Angeles. And the third explosion in the distance occurs much further south. I estimate this bomb was dropped directly from Compton. Finally, the first bomb that sends Cooper into the hills is a little harder to identify. But since we can see the edge in this aerial shot to the right, we can use it to estimate that it would be approximately here, just south of Koreatown.

Admittedly, it's a guess based on our limited data, and it may be a few blocks in either direction, but trust me, it won't end up mattering that much in the end. Okay, now that we've identified where the nuclear weapons went off, we need to determine exactly how high in the air they were when they exploded. But wait, why would they be exploding in the air? Well, we've gone into great detail about this in previous videos, but in summary? Detonating an explosive device in the air actually provides much more destructive power than when it explodes on the ground.

This concept is known as an airburst, and is actually how the atomic bombs deployed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II were detonated, and this largely follows what we see here in Fallout. If you look at this shot frame by frame, although it's a little hard to make out, we can see that the center of the flash, and therefore the explosion, is right above the buildings here in Hollywood. Unfortunately, as we just explained, these buildings are not real, so we cannot use them to get an exact measurement of this height. So what we're going to do is use the tallest building currently in Los Angeles, the Wilshire Grand Center, as a reference point.

This building has a height of 1100 feet or 335 meters, which seems reasonable for an explosion like this. But, as we will soon see, going up or down a dozen meters will not change the final result much. Finally, the last piece of the puzzle we need here is how powerful these bombs are. The performance, or power, of bombs of this size is measured in terms of how much TNT would be needed to obtain the same amount of power. So, to put it in context, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of 15 kilotons, or 15,000 tons of TNT. But how big are these bombs in Fallout?

Fortunately, this is where the fact that the show's games take place in the same universe comes into play. See, with every copy of the original Fallout 1 was the Vault Dweller's Survival Guide. Basically, it was the player's manual, but written from the point of view of universe vault technology. Man, I miss when games came with cool inserts like this in the box. Regardless, the Survival Guide explains that, quote: The yield of a modern strategic warhead is, with few exceptions, typically in the range of 200 to 750 kilotons. It's actually quite a bit smaller than the largest bombs the United States has today, which weigh about 1.2 megatons, or 1,200 kilotons of TNT.

But using information from the Survival Guide, we'll say that the three smallest explosions we see are towards the end of that range, around 200 kilotons in size, while the big bomb that started the whole sequence is at the top of that range. scale, approximately 750 kilotons. With bombs like that, you can see why they say war, war never changes. And you can experience it for yourself, thanks to today's

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and let's get back to Fallout's explosive results. And now, with all that information, where the bombs fell, at what height and size, we can plug all of that into this Nukemap online tool to simulate exactly how much devastation these bombs would cause in the City of Angels.

And... they're all dead. See what I meant earlier when I said a few meters here or there ultimately wouldn't matter? Regardless of where Cooper was in these mountains, whether it was the Griffith Observatory or the Hollywood Sign, or basically anywhere in the greater Los Angeles area, he would be dead long before he knew what hit him, and much longer before he could mutate. in the macabre despair we see later in the story. Now, we could go into painful detail about exactly what would cause these explosions that would kill Cooper and his daughter, but honestly? We've talked a lot about the effects of these types of nuclear explosions in the past, and just look at this map.

I think the broad strokes will cover it very well. At this distance from these explosions, Cooper would have been hit by an overpressure shock wave of around 4.81 PSI. That's enough to break glass and almost enough to burst his eardrum, if he survived that long for the blast wave to hit him. See, the radiant heat from the explosions would have hit him first, traveling at the speed of light, cooking every square inch of his body. Thermal doses are generally measured in calories per square centimeter, and for a frame of reference, third-degree burns are set at around 8 calories per square centimeter.

The first and largest bomb in Koreatown here in Fallout would have hit Cooper and everyone else at that birthday party at 12.5 calories per square centimeter, which would almost certainly be lethal, while the closest bomb in Hollywood would have followed shortly after with another 26.3 calories. per square centimeter. These bombs would basically cook them instantly, and even if Cooper and the rest could somehow survive all of that, the ionizing radiation released by the explosions would reach them in no time. In just one hour in this post-nuclear Los Angeles, Cooper would have been exposed to 1,720 rems, or rads, of radiation, enough to incapacitate you infive minutes and kill you in a matter of days.

Again, as a frame of reference, even in games like Fallout 4, just a thousand rads are enough to make your player character collapse and die on the spot. Clearly, given what we know of Fallout history and what we see here in the Fallout TV show, Cooper and everyone else we see in this opening scene, being that close to these 200 or 750 kiloton bombs would kill them instantly, breaking his organs. vaporizing their skin and irradiating their bodies. And normally I'd be content to leave things here. It's a fun reveal about this show that puts this really cool scene in a new light using a combination of science and lore.

This main character is dead and we can prove it. Classic theoretical stuff. But something about this whole thing still bothered me. As I watched the show and saw these explosions, I couldn't help but think that they seemed a little, well, small. I've done a ton of research on nuclear explosions during my time here at Theorist, and while I'm not a nuclear physicist, what I do know is that these bombs are supposed to be huge. It's like stretching out into the massive atmosphere. But these explosions are simply not that. They are big, don't get me wrong, but they are not as big as they should be.

So I decided to dig a little deeper into the data and found an interesting feature in Nukemap. See, once you detonate the bombs in the tool, you can export that data to Google Earth and see the scale of the mushroom clouds in all their glory. But when I did this for the 200 and 750 kiloton

nukes

, this is what I got. If this seems like a confusing image to you, it's true, it was to me too. It wasn't until I zoomed out that I realized that what we're seeing here, that whole black blob that takes up much of the image, is the mushroom cloud we should see if these nuclear weapons had as powerful a yield as Fallout lore says so.

Essentially, while riding a horse around the Griffith Observatory, Cooper would basically be inside the mushroom cloud of the bomb detonated in Hollywood, and the height of these clouds would have to be up to 18 kilometers. There's simply no way these bombs we see here on the show are as powerful as the Vault Dwellers survival guide told us, but we can find out how strong they are based on what we see. Yes, after playing around with Nukemap a bit more, I was able to create this, which is much more faithful to the size of the clouds we see in the show.

Do you want to guess how powerful these bombs are? It's not 100 kilotons. They don't even weigh 10 kilotons. In fact, the smallest bombs here have a yield of only 100 tons, 150 times the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and the largest bomb detonated at the show here in Koreatown ended up a bit larger, but still , it was only one kiloton of TNT. On the scale of nuclear explosions we've seen in the media and in the real world, that's incredibly small. Now, don't get me wrong, for the city of Los Angeles, these explosions will still be devastating. The city would be in disrepair, no doubt, but for the vast majority of Angelenos, they would have plenty of time to get into their cars or horses to escape.

In fact, not only would Cooper totally survive this type of explosion in the Hollywood Hills at Griffith Observatory, but he probably wouldn't experience any negative side effects if he stayed away from the downwind consequences. And what's more, it's not even that these explosions are significantly smaller than the others we've seen throughout the Fallout franchise. Both the bomb in Fallout 3's Megaton Quest and the explosion in Fallout 4's prologue are in line with the ones we see here in the Fallout TV show, so does that mean these super-powerful nuclear explosions that wiped out civilization might not be have been so global? -Surprisingly powerful as we see in various pieces of Fallout media?

That the world maybe shouldn't have been as devastated as we see in the games and on the show? Honestly, yes. Now, don't get me wrong, the creators of the Fallout franchise considered this back in the day. According to the Vault Dwellers Survival Guide, although the power of the nuclear bombs was lower than the largest bombs we have today, they released much more nuclear

fallout

than expected. And what we see here on the show are just four of the potentially thousands, or tens of thousands, of bombs that hit America during the Great War. In fact, we know from dialogue in Fallout New Vegas that 77 nuclear weapons were launched in and around Las Vegas alone, targeting that city alone.

So yes, things would have gone wrong even with the smallest nuclear weapons. But having said all that, ignoring the idea that the bombs in Fallout released more radiation than expected, let me ask you this. In the real world with real nuclear weapons, how long do you think society would need to stay in their shelters and vaults before it would be safe to go out again? 10 years? 100 years? 200? Never? Well, what if I told you it could actually be just a few weeks? Yes, weeks. When we think of nuclear disasters, what usually comes to mind is Chernobyl or Fukushima, where radiation levels can still be problematic decades after the initial incidents.

In meltdowns like these, radioactive uranium and plutonium leak into the local environment. And unfortunately, those elements have high half-lives, the amount of time it takes for just half of the radioactive atoms to dissipate. It can take tens of thousands, or even hundreds of millions of years, for those elements to become inert. So for us humans, that basically means there will be dangerous amounts of radiation at those disaster sites forever. But things are different when it comes to a radioactive explosion. When a nuclear bomb explodes, the uranium and plutonium that fuel it are quickly converted into energy and dozens of other radioactive isotopes.

And fortunately, most of these isotopes have relatively small half-lives, with radiation levels dropping by more than 50% after just one hour and 99% after just 48. Basically, for every 7-fold increase in time, there is a 10-fold increase. decrease in radioactivity. After a few weeks, radiation levels will likely be as low as they will be for a long time and should be safe enough for humanity to emerge from their vaults to flee or rebuild. You do not believe me? Well, we can look at real world examples like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those cities were being rebuilt just months after the bombs fell, and today, radiation levels in both are basically no higher than anywhere else in the world.

And if you want an example that's a little closer to home, you could spend an entire year at ground zero of the Oppenheimer Trinity Test and be exposed to completely normal and safe levels of radiation. Now don't get me wrong. Any amount of nuclear conflict is not good. These explosions suck for humanity, for civilization, for anyone and anything. And even if the amount of radioactive

fallout

was a fraction of the devastation we see in the games and spectacle, it would cause irreversible damage to the Earth and our fellow humans. And remember, according to Fallout lore, the bombs released more radiation than expected.

But still, the big takeaway is that if the bombs were as big as what we can see with our own eyes here in this series, here in this scene in the show, it wouldn't be as bad as the Fallout franchise wants us to be. believe. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't be the end of civilization as we know it, both in the real world and in Fallout. Yes, one last twist of the nuclear knife here, but even if the explosions and resulting radiation didn't destroy the world, the long-term effects of the bombs still could. In addition to the enormous destructive power of nuclear explosions, the energy from the bombs would likely cause many large fires.

This, in turn, would generate a lot of smoke, and with thousands of fires burning across the United States, if not the world, billions of pounds of soot and ash would be released into the atmosphere. Look, it would be enough to block the sun just a little bit to reduce the world's average temperature by a few degrees Celsius, enough to have an irreversible effect on our climate. So unlike what we see here in Fallout with a hot, nuclear desert, the planet is much more likely to enter a nuclear winter. This, in turn, would devastate many of the crops that were able to grow, and some nuclear war models project that around 80% of the world's population would starve to death.

Something very similar happened in the real world in the year 1816, known as the year without a summer. In 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted, releasing particles into the atmosphere that prevented enough sunlight from reaching Earth to temporarily lower the temperature by a couple of degrees. Because of this, for much of the world summer did not arrive the following year. Crops failed across Europe and the United States, and millions of people struggled to find food, all on a single volcano. Now let's multiply that by the atomic fire of thousands, or even tens of thousands, of nuclear bombs. This right here is a big part of why nuclear war is such an existential threat.

Yes, the initial explosions could kill an unfathomable number of people, and the radiation would have dangerous long-term side effects, but that's assuming we get that far. The Fallout series has never been one to sugarcoat how terrible such an apocalypse would be. Obviously, this is a world I wouldn't want to live in. But what we see in this show and in the games, a world that has recovered enough to have cities and settlements like Shady Sands in Philadelphia, Diamond City in Megaton, even This might be too optimistic a perspective. But hey, that's just a theory, a FILM THEORY, and that's it.

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