Film Theory: The Fallout Nukes are a LIE

The world of Fallout is a lie.

The irradiated desert wasteland full of people struggling to survive isn't what would happen

if the bombs we see in the Fallout show dropped in the real world.

But the reality is so, so much worse.

Strap on your Pip-Boys, loyal theorists, as we explore the real Fallout 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 start a flame in your heart.

So believe it or not, but for as much as I love movies, I am also a lifelong gamer.

I did get my start editing for Game Theory, after all.

And the games I love the most?

RPGs like Fallout.

No joke, I had a cat named after the game director at Fallout's 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 banded together in makeshift cities and raider gangs pillaging

the wasteland, or inside vaults designed to keep their residents safe.

And all of that is wrapped in a pretty bow of a retro-future aesthetic, dark humor, and

over-the-top violence.

This is one franchise that does not pull its punches.

So why are we talking about this game franchise on Film Theory today?

Well, I was both excited and terrified to hear that they were adapting the series into

a television show over on Amazon Prime.

Would it live up to the franchise's highest heights, or be broken and janky?

Well, I'm happy to say that the Fallout show is more Last of Us than Halo, a faithful

adaptation that features all of the same brutal comedy and social commentary that makes Fallout

so special.

All while using art directly out of the games and being a pretty dang good TV show on top

of it.

I have to say, I did get some pretty good feelings on this one when they proudly proclaimed

me from the studio who brought us free two-day shipping.

It just feels so...Fallout.

Oh my gosh, Lee.

Lee!

Are you stealing another one of my franchises?

No.

No no no no!

Get out of here, Tom.

This one's mine.

I was there when Fisto told me to assume the position, when there were cars falling out

of the sky in Fallout 4.

I've spent more time modding these games than some people have spent playing them,

Tom.

Come back and get mad when I steal Minecraft or something, I don't know.

In Los Angeles, while most of the Fallout show takes place a full two centuries after

the end of the world, the opening scene decides to do something a little bit different, instead

starting the day the bombs fell.

Here, one of our protagonists, Cooper Howard, sees the blasts ignite all across the Los

Angeles skyline.

Desperate to get to safety, Cooper and his daughter head for the Hollywood Hills.

It's a chilling scene.

Los Angeles is more or less wiped off the face of the map.

Neighbors and friends turn on one another.

Everyone is running for their lives.

But of course, I wouldn't be a very good theorist if scenes like this didn't also

trigger my scientific curiosity.

After all, Cooper and his daughter are awfully close to some of these explosions, and it

made me think, could they even survive this?

Would Cooper have even had the opportunity to make it past this day and link up with

the other characters in the show?

I just had to dig into it, and after running the numbers, well, the answer shocked me,

and it's gonna blow this show wide open.

See loyal theorists, if you look at this scene, you'll find that the world of this show,

that the entire Fallout franchise sets up, is a lie.

More likely than not, none of these characters in the opening scene would have made it, Cooper

included, and few of the future characters would have even had the opportunity to be

born.

The Fallout of Fallout would have been much worse than even this series could have imagined.

So step into your power armor, friends, we're headed into the wasteland to find out why.

To start, let's all catch ourselves up on what we're talking about here.

First off, the show is actually set in the same canon as the games, which itself is a

challenge since most of the games all have multiple endings, but that's a headache

for another day.

Regardless, the show also has the distinction of being amongst some of the earliest and

the latest content we see in the Fallout timeline.

Yeah, though the main events of the show take place in 2296, around nine years after the

events of Fallout 4, there are numerous flashbacks that take place in or before 2077 and the

Great War that destroyed the world.

And though this isn't the first time we've seen the bombs drop in the franchise, it is

the best look at the devastating event that the series has offered to date.

Because of that, we can now do all sorts of cool stuff, like figure out exactly how bad

these bombs would have been for the world, and specifically for Cooper here.

Let's start out by figuring out exactly where the bombs dropped in this scene.

This part of the show takes place in Los Angeles, and we get a nice aerial shot as three nukes

are detonated over the city.

This right here gives us all of the info we need to pinpoint these explosions, all thanks

to this building.

That there in the corner of this shot is the Griffith Observatory, a famous landmark that

you may recognize from everything 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 show, letting us know

that we're here somewhere up in the mountains north of Hollywood.

You may also notice that unlike the show, there aren't any skyscrapers here in this

part of LA in the real world.

But this would still make sense given that this portion of the Fallout timeline takes

place a full 50 years after the present day, and that the world of Fallout diverged from

our own shortly after World War II, so we can forgive this little bit of artistic license

taken with the LA skyline.

Regardless, using this information, we can figure out roughly where the epicenter of

these three explosions are.

The one closest to Cooper is just southeast of the observatory, putting Ground Zero right

about here in Hollywood.

The second explosion is even further southeast, putting it smack dab in downtown LA.

And the third explosion off in the distance there is quite a bit further south.

I'd estimate that this bomb was dropped straight out of Compton.

Finally, the very first bomb that sends Cooper headed for the hills is a bit tougher to identify.

But because we can see the edge of it in this aerial shot over on the right, we can use

that to estimate that it would be roughly here, just south of Koreatown.

Admittedly, that is a bit of a guess based on our limited data, and it may be a few blocks

in either direction, but trust me, it won't actually end up mattering that much in the

end.

Okay, now that we've identified where the nukes went off, we need to figure out exactly

how high they were in the air 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 the long and

short of it?

Detonating an explosive device in the air actually provides far more destructive power

versus when it explodes on the ground.

This concept is known as an air burst, and it's actually how the atomic bombs deployed

in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were detonated in World War II, and this mostly tracks with

what we see here in Fallout.

If you go through this shot frame by frame, though it's a bit difficult to make out,

we can see that the center of the flash, and therefore the explosion, is just over the

top of the buildings here in Hollywood.

Unfortunately, like we just explained, these buildings aren't actually real, so we can't

use them to get an exact measurement of this height.

So what we're going to do instead is use the tallest building currently in Los Angeles,

the Wilshire Grand Center, as a benchmark.

This building stands at 1100 feet, or 335 meters tall, which sounds reasonable for an

airburst like this.

But again, as we will soon see, going a dozen meters up or down isn't going to change

the end result that much.

Finally, the last piece of the puzzle we need here is just how powerful these bombs are.

The yield, or power, of bombs this big is measured in terms of just how much TNT it

would take to get the same amount of power.

So, for 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?

Thankfully, this is where the fact that the games in the show take place in the same universe

comes in clutch.

See, packaged 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 the in-universe

vault tech.

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, now typically in the

range of 200 to 750 kilotons.

That's actually quite a bit smaller than the biggest bombs the US has today, which

sit at around 1.2 megatons, or 1,200 kilotons of TNT.

But using the info from the Survival Guide, we're gonna say that the three smaller explosions

we see are towards the bottom of that range, around 200 kilotons in size, while the big

bomb that started the whole sequence is at the top of that scale, approximately 750 kilotons.

With bombs like that, you can see why they say that war, war never changes.

And you can experience that for yourself, thanks to the sponsor for today's theory,

War Thunder, available now free for consoles and PC.

War Thunder is the most comprehensive vehicle combat game ever, with over 2,500 tanks, planes,

helicopters and ships, painstakingly recreated down to the tiniest detail, including their

individual components, crew and realistic damage taken during battle.

I have always been a buff for World War II history, trivia and movies, so seeing all

the iconic tanks and planes from the 40's in-game, realistically rendered with authentic

sound effects, it's just incredible.

But the game's not just limited to World War II, you can find everything from 1920's

biplanes to modern day fighter jets from over 10 major nations in War Thunder, all given

the same insane attention to detail.

So if any of this sounds appealing to you, please go join the War Thunder community,

70 million players strong, and engage in some PVP war games perfect for fans of military

history, all by clicking the link in the description below.

And hey, for a limited time, new and returning players who haven't played for six months

will receive a huge bonus pack that nets you multiple premium vehicles, the exclusive Eagle

of Valor vehicle decorator, 100,000 silver lions and seven days of a premium account.

Once again, thank you so much to War Thunder for sponsoring today's theory, and let's

hop back into the explosive results of Fallout.

And now, with all of that info, where the bombs fell, how high they were, and how big

they were, we can plug all of that into this online tool Nukemap to simulate exactly how

much devastation these bombs would wreak across the city of angels.

And… everyone's dead.

See what I meant earlier when I said a few meters here or there wasn't ultimately gonna

matter?

Regardless of where Cooper was in these mountains, whether it was at the Griffith Observatory

or the Hollywood sign, or basically anywhere in the greater Los Angeles area, he'd be

dead long before he knew it hit him, and longer before he could mutate into the ghoulish desperado

we see later in the story.

Now, we could go into painful detail about exactly what from these explosions would be

killing Cooper and his daughter, but honestly?

We've talked about the effects of these sorts of nuclear explosions a lot in the past,

and just look at this map.

I think the broad strokes are gonna cover it just fine.

At this range from these explosions, Cooper would have been hit by an overpressure blast

wave of just around 4.81 PSI.

That's enough to break glass and just about enough to burst your eardrum, if he even survived

that long for the shockwave to hit.

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 dosages are typically measured in calories per square centimeter, and just so

you have a frame of reference, third degree burns set in at around 8 calories per square

centimeter.

The first and largest bomb in Koreatown here in Fallout would have been hitting Cooper

and everyone else at that birthday party with 12.5 calories per square centimeter, which

would be almost certainly lethal, while the closest bomb in Hollywood would have followed

shortly with another 26.3 calories per square centimeter.

They'd basically be instantly cooked by these bombs, and even if Cooper and the rest

were somehow able to survive all of that, the ionizing radiation released by the blasts

would be getting to them in no time.

In just an hour in this post-nuclear LA, Cooper would have been exposed to 1,720 rems, or

rads, of radiation, enough to incapacitate you in five minutes and kill you within days.

Again, for a frame of reference, even in the games like Fallout 4, just a thousand rads

is enough to cause your player character to keel over and die on the spot.

Clearly, given what we know in Fallout lore and what we see here in the Fallout TV show,

Cooper and everyone else we see in this opening scene just being so close to these 200 or

750 kiloton bombs would kill them instantly, rupturing their organs, vaporizing their skin,

and irradiating their bodies.

And normally, I'd be content to leave things here.

That's a fun revelation about this show putting 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 Theorist stuff.

But something about this whole thing was still bothering me.

As I was watching the show and seeing these explosions, I couldn't help but think that

they looked a little, well, small.

I've done a surprising amount of research about nuclear explosions during my time here

at Theorist, and though I'm no nuclear physicist, I do know that these bombs are supposed to

be massive.

Like, stretch up into the atmosphere massive.

But these explosions are just not that.

They're big, don't get me wrong, but they're not as large as they should be.

So I decided to dive a little deeper into the data, and found an interesting feature

over on 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 of their glory.

But when I did this for the 200 and 750 kiloton nukes, this is what I got.

If this looks like a confusing image to you, fair, it was to me too.

It wasn't until I zoomed out that I realized that what we're seeing here, all of that

black blob taking up so much of the image, that is the mushroom cloud we should be seeing

if these nukes had a yield as powerful as Fallout lore says.

Essentially, as he rides his horse on by the Griffith Observatory, Cooper would basically

be inside of the mushroom cloud of the bomb detonated in Hollywood, and the height of

these clouds should be as tall as 18 kilometers.

There is simply no way that these bombs we see here in the show are as powerful as the

Vault Dwellers survival guide told us, but we can figure out how strong they are based

on what we see.

Yeah, after playing around with Nukemap a little bit more, I was able to create this,

which is far more true to size of the clouds we see in the show.

You want to take a wild guess at how powerful these bombs are?

They're not 100 kilotons.

They're not even 10 kilotons.

In fact, the smaller bombs here have a yield of just 100 tons, 150th the power of the bomb

dropped on Hiroshima, and the bigger bomb detonated in the show here in Koreatown ended

up just a little bit bigger, but even still, it was just a single kiloton of TNT.

On the scale of nuclear explosions that we've seen in the media and in the real world, that

is insanely small.

Now, don't get me wrong, for the city of Los Angeles, these explosions are still going

to be devastating.

The city would be in rough shape, no two ways about it, but for the vast majority of Los

Angelinos, they'd have plenty of time to hop in their cars or on their horses to escape.

In fact, not only would Cooper totally survive this sort of blast up in the hills of Hollywood

at the Griffith Observatory, but he'd likely experience no negative side effects whatsoever

if he stayed clear of the fallout headed downwind.

And what's more, this isn't even a case of these explosions being significantly smaller

than the other ones we've seen throughout the Fallout franchise.

Both the bomb in Fallout 3's Megaton Quest and the explosion from Fallout 4's prologue

are in line with the ones we see here in the Fallout TV show, so does that mean that these

super powerful, civilization-ending nuclear explosions might not have been as world-shatteringly

powerful as we see from various bits of Fallout media?

That the world maybe shouldn't have been as devastated as we see in the games and in

the show?

Honestly, yeah.

Now, don't get me wrong, the creators of the Fallout franchise did consider this back

in the day.

According to the Vault Dwellers Survival Guide, though the yields of the nuclear bombs were

smaller than the biggest bombs we have today, they did release far more nuclear fallout

than expected.

And what we see here in the show are just four of potentially thousands, or tens of

thousands of bombs that hit the US during the Great War.

In fact, we know from dialogue in Fallout New Vegas that 77 nukes were launched at Vegas

and its surrounding area alone, aimed at just that one city.

So yeah, things would have been bad even with the smaller nukes.

But with all of that being said, ignoring the idea that the bombs in Fallout released

more radiation than expected, let me ask you this.

In the real world with real nukes, how long do you think society would need to remain

in their shelters and vaults before it was safe to come out again?

10 years?

100 years?

200?

Never?

Well what if I told you that it could actually be as little as just a few weeks?

Yeah, weeks.

See, when we think of nuclear disasters, the things that typically come to mind are Chernobyl

or Fukushima, where radiation levels can still be problematic decades after the initial incidents.

In meltdowns like those, radioactive uranium and plutonium are leaked 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 that 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 goes off, the uranium and plutonium powering the bomb is quickly

converted into energy and dozens of other radioactive isotopes.

And thankfully, most of these isotopes have relatively tiny half-lives, with radiation

levels falling off more than 50% after just one hour and 99% after just 48.

Basically, for every 7-fold increase in time, there's a 10-fold decrease in radioactivity.

After about a few weeks, radiation levels are likely as low as they're gonna be for

a long time, and should be safe enough for humanity to emerge from their vaults to either

flee or rebuild.

Don't believe me?

Well, we can look at real-world examples like Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Those cities were being rebuilt just a few months after the bombs fell, and today, radiation

levels in both are basically no higher than they are anywhere else in the world.

And if you want an example that's a bit closer to home, you could spend an entire

year at the ground zero of Oppenheimer's Trinity Test and be exposed to entirely normal

and safe levels of radiation.

Now do not misunderstand me.

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 were a fraction of the devastation we see

in the games and the show, that would cause irreversible damage to the earth and our fellow

human beings.

And remember, according to Fallout lore, the bombs released more radiation than expected.

But still, the big takeaway here, if the bombs were as big as what we can see with our own

eyes here in this series, here in this scene from the show, it wouldn't be as bad as

the Fallout franchise wants us to believe.

But that's not to say that it wouldn't still be the end of civilization as we know

it, both in the real world and in Fallout.

Yeah, one last twist of the nuclear knife here, but even if the explosions and resulting

radiation wouldn't destroy the world, the long-term effects of the bombs still totally

could.

See along with the sheer destructive power of the nuclear explosions, the energy of the

bombs would likely cause many large fires.

This in turn would result in a lot of smoke, and with thousands of fires across the entire

United States, if not the entire world, billions of pounds of soot and ash are going to be

released into the atmosphere.

See, the sun would only need to be blocked just like a teeny tiny little bit to lower

the average temperature of the world 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 wasteland, it's far

more likely that the planet would enter a nuclear winter.

This in turn would devastate many of the crops that were able to grow, with some models of

nuclear war projecting that some 80% of the world population would die of starvation.

Something very similar actually happened in the real world in the year 1816, known as

the year without a summer.

See, in 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted and released particulates into the atmosphere

that blocked 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 come the next year.

Crops failed across Europe and the United States, with millions struggling to find food,

all from just one volcano.

Now multiply that by the atomic fire of thousands, or even tens of thousands of nuclear bombs.

This right here, that's a major part of why nuclear war is such an existential threat.

Yes, the initial explosions might kill unfathomable numbers of people, and the radiation would

have long-term dangerous side effects, but that's assuming we even get that far.

The Fallout series has never been one to sugarcoat how awful such an apocalypse would be.

Obviously, this is a world I would not 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 Philly, Diamond City in Megaton, even that

might be too optimistic an outlook.

But hey, that's just a theory, a FILM THEORY, and cut.

Once again, thanks to War Thunder for sponsoring this episode.

Remember, you can pick it up for free on consoles and PC.

And if you use the link in the description, for a limited time, new and returning players

who haven't played for six months will get that bonus pack with multiple premium vehicles,

the exclusive Eagle of Valor vehicle decorator, 100,000 silver lions, and seven days of a

premium account.

One last thanks to War Thunder, and I'll see you all next week.