Dear Bethesda,
Hi again! It’s me, Austin. Last week I wrote to you about your Glowing Sea, and about its
somewhat-plausibility according what we know about modern science. But you know, thinking
about nukes just raises more questions than it answers. Sure, we know about the Glowing
Sea now, but what about the rest of the United States? What about China? What about the rest
of the world? How many nukes would it take to turn the glorious United States into a
smoldering wreckage of what it once was? The answer may surprise you.
Those of you who watched my video last week now that the nukes in the Fallout Universe
are relatively small “tactical” nukes, ranging from 200-750 kilotons, which maximises
the immediate ground scatter of dangerous radioactive Fallout, as opposed to larger
bombs that do have a larger blast radius, but eject a lot of their radioactive Fallout
into the Stratosphere, where it tends to stay until most of the radiation dissipates harmlessly
and falls to the ground.
The basic set-up for the Fallout franchise is pretty simple: naturally resources are
diminishing and the two largest military and economic powers, China and the United States,
are fighting over what’s left. Some time before this, the Fallout timeline split from
our own, where, essentially, the cold war and Mutually Assured Destruction tactics never
ended. Mutually Assured Destruction, for those of you who either didn’t learn in school,
or simply erased it from your memory because of the sheer fucking terror and utter lack
of humanity that’s needed to precipitate this military doctrine--where was I? Oh, right.
Mutually Assured Destruction, aptly shortened to “MAD,” is a method of passive warfare
that basically means, “you kill me, I kill you.” It described the relationship between
the United States and the USSR during the cold war, when there were far, FAR too many
nuclear weapons on our planet, and the best way we could think of to keep ourselves from
killing one another was to say “hey, um, don’t launch nukes at me, and I won’t
launch any at you.”
Thankfully, this ridiculous stance on international politics mostly dissipated, though personally
I always kinda had the impression that it never fully left the table. Anyway. This is
the world of Fallout, one where this idea never went anywhere. And someone, it doesn’t
really matter who, launched nukes, and so then everybody launched nukes at everyone
important, and poof, Fallout started.
Jesus Diaz at Gizmodo actually did the math to figure out how many nukes would have to
be dropped to blink all of humanity out of existence in an instant. He figures we’re
almost as tenacious as the cockroach, so unless we managed to eliminate all people, we’d
survive. And, if Fallout as a franchise is any indication, this seems to be true. Anyway,
he estimates it would take over 1.2 MILLION nuclear missiles to eliminate all people with
raw nuclear ragey blasts. Holy fucking shit. That’s intense. Okay, well, fine, whatever.
Luckily for the designers at Interplay and Bethesda, that’s not the world they created
in their game. But, enough dawdling, how many fucking nukes would it take to create our
game?
Well, it’s actually pretty easy to figure out. A 750 kiloton nuclear bomb creates an
initial blast that’s relatively small that kills anybody in its radius, but it can spread
deadly doses of radiation in an eclipse of 20-25 miles in as little as 3 hours, more
than enough of a window to cause significant casualties to anybody in that range. So we
simply take the square mileage of China, about 3.7 million square miles, and the united states--don’t
forget to add canada because the United States annexed Canada during the resource war, which
gives us over 6 million square miles for the US. Add them together, and divide by 25 square
miles and you get...422,000 nukes to Fallout-ify both China and the United States.
Shit. That’s...a
lot. To put it in perspective, at the height of the cold war, there were only 66,000 nuclear
weapons on the entire planet. But you know what, the world of Fallout is a world where
the cold war basically never ended.
Nuclear weapon production peaked in 1985 and has been dropping significantly ever since.
But what if instead of ramping down production, the world kept building nuclear weapons at
the rate it was at its peak all the way up until everyone launched in 2077? Luckily the
math for this is pretty easy, and...it gets us 218,556 nuclear weapons. SHit. That’s
an ASSLOAD, don’t get me wrong, but it’s half the number needed to totally obliterate
the United States and China.
So, I’m sorry to say it, Bethesda and Interplay, but your Fallout Universe makes no god damn
se--
And then, suddenly, I realized I was thinking about this problem all wrong. Y’see, my
math is, er, was, based around a United State and China where the entire population is evenly
spread out across the countries, and in order to cause maximum fatal damage, you’d have
to drop nukes in a perfect grid. But this is not how humans populated regions, like,
at all. We don’t, like, just evenly spread out--we congrate. In fact, according to the
United States census bureau, 94.6% of the united states is open, Rural Space--aka not
strategically significant. Most people in the united states live on only 5.4% of our
land. That’s a huge space reduction. Remember, in the world of Fallout, humanity isn’t
entirely wiped out, merely mostly wiped out. There are plenty of people who survived who
didn’t make it to vaults. And in order to enact mutually assured destruction, you just
have to cripple and eliminate a nation, not turn it into glass. That means you eliminate
the leadership and most of the population. Anyway. China’s population is more spread
out, but they also have vast areas that are almost entirely unpopulated.
The math is a bit trickier since China’s census data isn’t quite as available, but
they seem to be roughly twice as spread out as the United States. All said and done, it’ll
take about 15.8% of our original estimate of over 400,000 nukes to create a Nuclear
Wonderland, which is...66,676 nukes. Holy...that’s...
jesus.
Sorry, I just need a minute because I just realized that at one point in our history
there were actually enough nukes on the planet to actually eradicate both the United States
and Russia. Like...it could have actually happened. Fuck. I have the numbers right here.
66,676 nukes to kill almost everybody in two major countries, and in 1985 there were 61,000
on the planet. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK. What a TERRIBLE FUCKING IDEA. Who the FUCK
said “oh, we invented this device that can kill people with a ferocity as-of-yet unparalleled
by anything that’s not a greek fucking myth, so let’s make enough to fucking ruin everything
FUCKING FUCK. FUCK. FUCK. Man. the people who don’t like when I swear are going to
have a field day today.
Anyway. Our earlier estimates said there could be as many as 218,000 nukes on earth in 2077,
which is more than enough to wipe out the United States, China, polish off Europe, and
do a sizeable amount of damage to a handful of countries in the Middle East.
It stretches the imagination that there’d be enough nukes in anybody’s arsenals, particularly
during a time of resource scarcity, to completely fallout-ify the entire world. Considering
that the major players in the Resource Wars were the United States, China, and Europe,
they would have taken the brunt of the force of the launches. So what about the rest of
the world? Well. It’s not a cakewalk for them. Countries neighboring target countries
would have to worry about radioactive dust storms and ash. Furthermore, smoke from the
fires caused by the launching of so many nuclear weapons would enter the atmosphere and absorb
sunlight, causing a global cooling event called, fittingly, a nuclear winter. Now, it’s not
as dour as it may seem at first. In countries not dealing with nuclear Fallout, growing
seasons would be shortened by 10-40 days a year, and there’d be a drop in average global
temperatures for as long as 25 years, when it’s estimated most of the ash will have
settled and things would mostly be back to normal. There’d be a higher risk of genetic
mutation, but it’d be negligible.
You know, this pretty handily gives pretty strong evidence for there being pockets of
the world that are effectively paradise compared to the United States and China. Countries
in Africa and South America would very likely be safe from large strikes, and, honestly,
are probably dominating the world technologically and economically, while we, in the United
States, are forced to squabble and claw at one another in our shitty tribes and our little
problems that don’t matter.
Are there Columbian Drug Lords in the Fallout universe that have unified to form advanced
future governments? We’ll probably never know. But anyway. That’s enough of that.
Turns out, horrifyingly, the world of Fallout is totally plausible, at least from a nuclear
destruction perspective. I’m just...going to casually start digging my own fallout shelter
now. Oh. I guess, that means, yeah. I can, uh, talk about Vaults next week. Sweet.
Sincerely, Austin