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Just How Realistic is Fallout 4's Post-Apocalypse Anyway?

Written by Steven Messner
December 28, 2015

The first time you step out of the protective vault and into the irradiated wasteland of Boston in Fallout 4, taking in the devastation can be overwhelming. For two decades, the Fallout series has explored life after the bombs fell. But sorting fact from fiction in Fallout's depiction of a world devastated by war can be tougher than you think. While radiation ravaged ghouls and burly super mutants are easily identified as works of fantasy, how much of Fallout and its post-apocalypse is based in fact?

Few people know more about the damaging effects of a nuclear war than Dr. Michael J Mills, a scientist working with the National Center for Atmospheric Research. In 2014, Dr. Mills, along with several of his associates, published a study detailing the global climate effects of a nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India using less than 1 percent of the world's nuclear weapons. The results were terrifying.

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From each of these 100 detonations, massive firestorms would engulf whole cities and churn five million tons of black carbon into the stratosphere. That carbon would be so dense that the sun would almost be blocked out entirely, triggering what Dr. Mills described as a "little ice age." Furthermore, the black carbon trapped in the atmosphere would heat up from the sun, destroying the ozone layer by as much as 50 percent over populated areas. The extra harm caused by UV radiation along with a shortening of crop seasons due to cooling could result in the starvation of almost 2 billion people—and that's just from 100 15 kiloton missiles. Considering that the city of Las Vegas from Fallout: New Vegas was the target of 77 nuclear warheads alone, and the fact that page 11 of the Fallout 1 game manual states that the average size of a nuclear warhead is between 200-750 kilotons instead of a measly 15, it's easy to guess that the consequences would be suitably apocalyptic.

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In 2006, Dr. Alan Robock, a climatologist and professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, published a study detailing the effects of a nuclear war between the USA and Russia, a popular theme for simpler studies in the 1980s, and found that a war between the United States and Russia could cause upwards of 150 million tons of black carbon to be pumped into the stratosphere. This would trigger a global decrease in temperatures by upwards of -8°C. North America could expect to experience summers -20°C degrees colder than average. In fact, it wouldn't be summer at all, it would be a nuclear winter. And the food shortages caused by this ice age, which would last over a decade, in combination with the widespread devastation from the bombs and subsequent radiation, would likely kill every human alive.

Curiously, though the effects of a nuclear winter were understood well before the first Fallout ever released in 1996, there is barely any mention of it occurring.

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But Fallout 4 is a video game and its world is experienced more through the characters and creatures you encounter than the climate of the wasteland. This is exactly where Fallout begins to deviate the most from science.

Dr. Timothy Mousseau has been studying the impact of radioactive contaminants on wildlife populations around the Chernobyl and Fukushima disaster zones, which makes him one of the foremost experts on the deleterious effect radiation can have on living things. Despite recent popular studies and articles suggesting that Chernobyl has become a refuge for animals despite its high amounts of radioactivity, Dr. Mousseau's research takes a much closer look at the harmful effects of radiation rather than just looking at overall population numbers.

"Many of the populations that are out there in the wild are teetering all the time," he said during our interview. "And so a little push towards the negative is often enough to drive them towards local extinction. And if you have a large scale event, this could actually lead to much larger areas of extinction." Dr. Mousseau went on to elaborate that with species that exist within a small geographical footprint, it wouldn't be unrealistic to expect them to go extinct entirely.

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