The Great War: the Day the Bombs Fell in Fallout

The Great War is the nuclear war of 23 October 2077 that destroyed the old world in Fallout. It came at the end of decades of fighting over oil and uranium, and in about two hours the United States, China and much of the rest of the planet were reduced to ash. Every Fallout game and the TV series is set in the wasteland it left behind, and the opening line of the series, "War never changes," is about it. (Fallout; Fallout 4)

What happened on 23 October 2077#

A terminal in the Switchboard, a Defense Intelligence Agency bunker in Boston, logs the sequence: four missile launches detected, DEFCON 2 at 9:13, and at 9:26 an authenticated order for a nuclear response scenario. (Fallout 4)

Fallout 4 plays the moment from the ground. In Sanctuary Hills outside Boston, a television newscaster breaks in with reports of flashes and explosions in New York and Pennsylvania, then loses the feed. The family runs for Vault 111 and the bomb lands to the southwest just as the Vault's lift starts to drop. Local legend says that blast created the Glowing Sea, the most irradiated place in the region. (Fallout 4)

Washington, D.C. was hit at the same time. In Fallout 3 every stopped clock in the Capital Wasteland reads 9:47, and Carol, a ghoul who was a little girl that morning, remembers that D.C. got a warning only because the West Coast was already gone. (Fallout 3)

The original Fallout's intro sums up the rest in a few lines. In 2077 the storm of world war came again, and in two brief hours most of the planet was reduced to cinders. (Fallout)

How the world got there#

Fallout's backstory is the Resource Wars. The intro to the first game sets it out: war was still being fought over resources in the 21st century, and the prize was petroleum and uranium. China invaded Alaska, the United States annexed Canada, and the European Commonwealth broke apart into squabbling states. (Fallout)

The Alaskan front is played out in Operation Anchorage, a military simulation of the battle to retake Anchorage. American troops in T-51b Power Armor lead the attack, and Fallout 4's loading screens say the T-51 was first introduced at the Battle of Anchorage. Victory there ended the fighting on American soil but not the war. (Fallout 3: Operation Anchorage; Fallout 4)

At home the government was busy with something else. West Tek's Forced Evolutionary Virus moved to the new Mariposa Military Base in California for testing on human subjects. Captain Roger Maxson's diary, found in the original game, records his discovery that the scientists were using military prisoners. He executed them and led his men out of the army, the beginning of the Brotherhood of Steel. (Fallout)

Meanwhile the Enclave, the government's secret core, had already moved the president to an oil rig off the California coast. A Boston Bugle story in Fallout 4 reports his relocation months before the bombs fell. (Fallout 2; Fallout 4)

Who fired first?#

The games deliberately leave it open, and every in-world answer comes from a biased source.

• Dick Richardson, the Enclave's president in Fallout 2, tells the Chosen One that America was winning when "those damn Reds" launched everything they had. He's a fanatic talking to a prisoner, so it's hardly neutral. (Fallout 2)
• Captain Zao, the ghoul commander of the Chinese submarine Yangtze stranded off Boston in Fallout 4, says that 200 years earlier he launched all of its high-yield nuclear missiles, as ordered, and has lived with the guilt since. That proves China fired, not that China fired first. (Fallout 4)
• The Switchboard terminal in Fallout 4 logs incoming launches before the American response order, which fits a Chinese first strike without naming one. (Fallout 4)

Tim Cain, co-creator of the original Fallout, gave his own answer in a 2023 interview with the YouTube channel TKs-Mantis. He said China nuked America because bio-weapons were illegal and China found out the US was developing FEV. The US promised to stop and simply moved the research somewhere else. When told that fans still argue about who shot first, he backed off a little and joked that it was probably "some rogue nation". (Tim Cain on who started the Great War)

How the TV series reframes the Great War#

The first episode of the TV series opens on the day itself. Cooper Howard, a cowboy actor, is working a child's birthday party in Los Angeles with his daughter Janey when a mushroom cloud rises over the city in broad daylight. (Fallout, "The End")

The season 1 finale goes back further. Cooper bugs his wife Barb's Pip-Boy and listens in on a Vault-Tec summit chaired by Barb and Bud Askins, attended by Robert House, West Tek's Leon Von Felden, Big MT and REPCONN. When House asks how Vault-Tec can guarantee a return on its Vaults, Barb answers that the company will stage the nuclear war itself. (Fallout, "The Beginning")

Season 2 adds a layer. In "The Other Player," a man named Siggi Wilzig corners Barb in a lift and makes it clear her family will die if she steps out of line. He tells her what to say at the coming summit, and it's the very pitch about dropping the bombs. Barb later admits to Cooper that she has no idea who really controls Vault-Tec. In the same episode a super mutant tells the Ghoul that the coming war is against the ones who set everything in motion: the Enclave. (Fallout, "The Other Player")

So the show gives the Great War a motive inside America, but it still hasn't shown a single American missile leaving the ground first. Vault-Tec talked about it, and the Enclave pushed the idea. Whether either one actually fired, or just profited from a war China started, is left open. (Fallout, "The Beginning"; Fallout, "The Other Player")

What the Great War left behind#

Most of the country burned, but there were exceptions. Las Vegas survived because Robert House had built missile defences around it. In Fallout: New Vegas he says they stopped 68 of the 77 warheads aimed at the city and the area around it, even though the platinum chip that would have upgraded them was still waiting for delivery that afternoon. That's why New Vegas exists at all. (Fallout: New Vegas)

Survivors on the surface who soaked up enough radiation without dying became ghouls, some of them living on for centuries. The Ghoul of the TV series is Cooper Howard himself, still alive in 2296. (Fallout; Fallout, "The End")

A lucky few got into Vault-Tec's Vaults, and Richardson admits in Fallout 2 that the shelters were mostly experiments. One that opened, Vault 15, gave rise to Shady Sands and later the New California Republic. (Fallout; Fallout 2)

The war never quite ended for some of its soldiers. Zao spent two centuries in his crippled submarine off Boston with his guilt, and Chinese remnant units still turn up in the Capital Wasteland, many of them ghouls who never stopped following their last orders. (Fallout 3; Fallout 4)

For the full order of events before and after the bombs, see the Fallout timeline. For how the show fits around the games, see the TV series explained.