The post-apocalyptic world of Fallout is a big and long-running one, which means that there’s tons of lore out there on its myriad factions, the creatures of the wasteland, and the many vaults that sheltered (and, uhh, experimented upon) people throughout the nuclear war that ravaged the world in 2077. But given that the Fallout games take place decades after those cataclysmic events, not an awful lot is known about the world before the bombs dropped, includingwhythe bombs dropped to trigger the so-called Great War.
Here we’re going to cover some of the big facts and theories surrounding the dropping of the bombs in Fallout: who dropped the bombs? What caused the Great War? And were there perhaps secret forces conspiring to make the war happen? Here’s everything curious vault expats need to know.
What Caused the Great War in Fallout?
The first thing to know is that the Fallout timeline diverges from reality some time shortly after World War II ends (1945). Given that Fallout’s representation of the USA has a charming retro-futuristic 1950s style and culture, it seems fair to assume that the split occurred some time around the 50s. For reasons that may as well be ‘because it looks cool,’ those 50s stylings remained all the way through until the bombs dropped in 2077.
The big prelude to the Great War was China’s military encroachment onto US soil in 2066, which kicked off theSino-American War.China launched an assault on Alaska in a successful bid to seize theoil pipeline in Anchorage(events which you can play in the Operation Anchorage DLC for Fallout 3). This was just the latest in a succession of destabilising global conflicts known as theResource Wars, which lasted from 2052 to 2077 as global supplies of petroleum, uranium and oil dwindled. However, no event in the war was nearly as cataclysmic as the event that would end it in 2077.
Despite China’s initial success in capturing the Anchorage pipeline, the United States countered after procuring military access across Canadian land and airspace. This caused an escalation in tensions with Canada, as the US ravaged Canadian land and consumed Canadian resources to support its counter-attack against China. Riots spread across Canada, and the extreme hostility shown to US forces resulted in theUnited States annexing Canadain June, 2072.
In 2074, the US opened another front in the Sino-American War by invading mainland China. The war was in complete stalemate until 2077, when the US finally liberated Anchorage with the help of the advancedT-51 Power Armor.The breakthrough on this front led to a great focus on the mainland China campaign, where T-51-clad US forces pushed deeper into the country. At this point, the US government fled to remote locations, knowing that a nuclear strike from an increasingly desperate China could occur at any moment. This government-in-hiding would later become known as theEnclave.
The United States' push into China appeared to be the beginning of the end. On July 25, 2025, the US responded to reports of nuclear attack by launching nukes at China. A nuclear back-and-forth began between the US and China ensued, and within two hours the two countries were decimated. At some point during this exchange, a Chinese stealth submarine in the North Atlantic Ocean, theYangtze-31, launched all but one of its warheads and missiles at key cities on the US east coast. There’s not much information on how much the rest of the world was directly impacted by the nukes, but the nuclear fallout and debris is said to have affected the atmosphere of the entire planet.
Who Fired the First Nuke in Fallout?
There is no official source on who fired the first nuke in the Great War, though the events of the war - as well as events in the hours leading up to the first reported nuke sightings - suggest that it was China. With that said, the timeline of events that fateful day in October 2077 isn’t entirely clear. Quite possibly the best timeline can be found on computer terminals at theSwitchboardin Fallout 4 - an abandoned secret base of operations for the Defence Intelligence Agency of the US. Here’s the sequence of events found on a computer there that seems to bring us closest to the truth of what happened on August 15, 2025:
0003 EST:US Pacific Fleet reports 3 USOs (Unidentified Submersible Vehicles) off the coast of California.
0337EST:US Air Force spots squadron of airplanes off the Bering Strait.
0913 EST: Integrated Operation Nuclear Detection System detects “4 probable launches” of ballistic missiles.
0917EST:Norad confirms “birds in the air.”
0926 EST:US retaliates and launches nuclear arsenal at China.
0942 EST:First Chinese nukes hit Pennsylvania and New York.
So who fired the first nuke? Well, we don’t know exactly. It’s crucial to point out that while a lot of evidence points to China, there is actually nothing there that specifically identifies China as having fired first. There’s nearly six hours between the spotted subs and planes in the Pacific (all unidentified) and the first “probable launches” of missiles. With east coast US cities seemingly hit first, it’s also not out of the question that the first Chinese nukes were launched from the Yangtze-31 in the North Atlantic.
Four ballistic missiles also seems like a small amount of nukes for China to launch its first strike on the US with. You’d expect a country with a the kind of arsenal it had to go all-out in the first strike, in the hope of damaging as much US infrastructure as possible.
So yes, the evidence points to China, but there just isn’t that much evidence to go by.
Did Vault-Tec Start the Great War?
One of the more popular fan theories surrounding the start of the Great War is around Vault-Tec Corporation, the powerful defence contractor who designed the vast underground bunkers known as the vaults for the US government. The theory was given some gravitas by the fact that in 2011 a script for a canned Fallout movie from the early 2000s popped up (thanks,VG247), in which it was revealed that Vault-Tec did indeed engineer the Great War. The key part in themovie synopsisthat says this is as follows:
Our Hero asks how the war started and is shocked to learn that it wasn’t China or North Korea or India that fired the first strike. The first nuclear bomb was launched by the creator of the vaults, a zealot businessman who wanted to fulfill his own prophecy of world annihilation. That first bomb triggered a panicked chain reaction among other countries, leading to a four hour WWIII.
However, the script was later changed to not include the Vault-Tec angle. Besides, the movie was scrapped so its influence on Fallout canon is ultimately irrelevant. Beyond that, the justification of ‘fulfilling a prophecy of world annihilation’ seems like quite flimsy reasoning from a cold, calculating businessman, and more the product of early 2000s video-game adaptation filmmaking than solid Fallout storytelling.
A stronger ballast for the Vault-Tec theory is the haziness of the information surrounding the first nukes launched in 2077. There’s no confirmation that it was China, and the US nuking China in response to “probable launches” of missiles has a slight whiff of behind-the-scenes skulduggery and misinformation. but the big question iswhywould Vault-Tec want to trigger a nuclear apocalypse? Here are some of the more popular theories:
The Vault-Tec theories tend not to suggest that Vault-Tec literally started the war itself, but merely that it nudged things along in that direction. All things considered, there’s no evidence that this is the case (apart from the fact that both Vault-Tec and the Enclave are terrible, amoral entities), so it needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
So while we may not know the exact cause of the Great War in Fallout, what we can say is that the world was in a terrible place leading up to the war, and that in some ways it was a culmination of years and years of resource over-consumption and bad politicking. War never changes, ‘ey folks?
