Civil Defense in the Fallout Series
For better or worse, nuclear warfare has dominated both the American psyche and American media since the dawn of the Cold War. From duck and cover drills to War Games, to fallout shelters and The Day After, we have long looked at the what-ifs of nuclear warfare with an almost violent curiosityâlike a train wreck or a plane crash, we simply cannot look away. Although the threat of nuclear war and mutually-assured destruction no longer looms like the spectre of death over our shoulders, we still find ourselves fascinated by it, and our media reflects this. An almost infinite number of books, television shows, movies, and video games have been dedicated, in some part, to the prospect or aftermath of nuclear warfare. Video games especially being a relatively new, mostly immersive medium, have taken the theme of nuclear warfare and ran with it, including Metro 2033, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., DEFCON, Civilization V, Call of Duty, Metal Gear Solid, and Ace Combat Zero, to name just a very small number of them. But no game series is more synonymous with nuclear warfare as the Fallout series.
Although I could personally talk about the Fallout universe, the history, the sociopolitical setting, and the Great War itself for hours on end, the gist of the series is that in a retro-futuristic, alternate timeline world, on October 23, 2077, âRed China,â the Soviet Union, and the United States finally pulled the trigger and engaged in a full-on nuclear war, with bombs falling on most U.S. cities, including Las Vegas, Boston, New York City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. The war itself lasted only two hours, but more energy was released in the first moments of the Great War than all the previous human conflicts combined. Entire mountain ranges were created by the sheer tectonic stress caused by the bombs, and the oceans and rivers of the world were contaminated irreversibly by the ârelatively low-yieldâ warheads. In short, the Fallout series is a (somewhat exaggerated) look at the realities of mutually-assured destruction, and a clear representation of all our nuclear fears.
But how realistic is this? How likely is it that if something like the Great War were to happen today would our land and water still be unusable 200 years in the future? In discussing this, we need to first look at the preventative measures taken in the Fallout universe. And this starts with civil defense.
Not much Fallout canon is dedicated to civil defense. Although there are posters from the âCivil Defense Administrationâ found in-game, most preventative measures in the Fallout series come from Vault-Tec and their vaults. But these vaults were sociological experiments disguised as fallout shelters, and ultimately, Vault-Tec was not actually concerned with the preservation and continuation of the United States post-war. Some vaults were rigged with poisonous gases, some had purposefully faulty blast doors, and some were simply absurd (such as Vault 77, which was populated by 999 puppets and one man.) Since we canât consider Vault-Tec an agent of emergency preparedness or disaster response, we must turn back towards the aforementioned Civil Defense Administration.
We know from in-game dialogue, terminals, notes, holotapes, and even character backstories that most people in 2077 were expecting a war any day. We can find personal basement shelters in bombed-out neighborhoods, Pulowski personal preservation shelters dotting street corners, and in the beginning of Fallout 4, as the bombs approach Boston, we can hear air raid sirens. We can find government bunkers like the South Boston military checkpoint and the Greenbrier Resort, and although not morally aligned to the concepts of American civil defense, some vaults did manage to provide safety for generations of dwellers. So, we know that some effort was made, and we can assume that these efforts were spear-headed by the Civil Defense Administration. But this is where the similarities between historical American civil defense and Fallout civil defense stop.
Walking around in a Fallout game, you encounter decimated homes and buildings, upturned roads, and irradiated water and soil. Skeletons litter the landscape. The few remaining buildings for the most part lack running water or electricity. There is no trash collection, there are no vehicles, there arenât even any authorities outside of rag-tag militias capable of curbing the rampant crime across the wasteland. Doctors are few and far-between and mostly self-taught, and pockets of radioactive waste remain in open-air pits. If the Fallout series truly had a Civil Defense Administration, this dangerous, dirty, destroyed world would simply not exist.
Historically, civil defense has focused on both emergency preparedness and disaster response. The civil defense agencies of the United States were comprised of rescue squads, decontamination squads, demolition and clearance crew, auxiliary police officers, auxiliary firefighters, nurses, doctors, road repair crews, utility repair crews, drivers, messengers, radio operators, food and housing corps, chaplains, refuse collection crews, and even gravediggersâall who focused on disaster response and, more importantly, rebuilding. Civil defense was almost singularly-focused on the idea of rebuilding, of piecing the country back together after an emergency, of reestablishing normalcy as quickly as possible.
In Fallout, however, this doesnât seem to be the case, except for a few exceptions. After the bombs fell, those remaining U.S. Armed Forces members tried their best to maintain order and control, but they quickly succumbed to the radiation and mobs. Then there were the Responders, seen in Fallout 76, who were an organization of police, firefighters, medics, and general volunteers that emerged in 2082 to provide medical assistance, supplies, and survival training to survivors. They were followed by Project Purity in Fallout 3, which was dedicated to decontaminating the water of the Washington D.C. area and providing potable water for survivors, although the project began in 2277, 200 years after the bombs fell. The last exception would be the Mojave Express, a courier service seen in Fallout: New Vegas in 2281. There is also the NCR Sharecropper Farm in Fallout: New Vegas, as well as a pastor in Diamond City in Fallout 4. But this isâŚit. There is no large-scale, nation-wide effort to rebuild. There are corpses and skeletons left where they fell, there are burnt-out cars left in the middle of the road, there are collapsed bridges and spewing pipelines and ponds so irradiated theyâve birthed new monstrosities like Swan in Fallout 4. There is no governing body, no faction that truly takes the reins, not even a surviving member of congress (technically, there was with the Enclave, but their motivations were selfish and generally fascist.) And this is anathema to the spirit of civil defense.
From a civil defense perspective, the Fallout series is almost insulting. It shows a total lack of law and order, a lack of neighborliness, a lack of effort to hold the world together. It shows tribe mentality, it shows the collapse of society, it shows the end of the world as we know it. This is not what civil defense, fictional or historical, would have strived for. It could be that, as we see in the case of Appalachia in Fallout 76, those who tried to rebuild were wiped out. It could be that, much like historic civil defense, it faced opposition in the form of apathy. Or it could simply be that a partially-recovered world is not nearly as compelling as a game as one where every water purification plant is overrun with Mirelurks and feral ghouls leap at you from the public library.
This is a sentiment echoed by many players of the two latest titles, Fallout 4 and Fallout 76. Iâll spare yâall the student game developer rants as much as possible here, but thereâs a lot to be said, so hold on. Most players absolutely hated the settlement system in Fallout 4. They despised the Minutemen, Preston Garvey, and protecting innocent farmers from Raiders. They hated having to sacrifice rare parts like gears and screws to build defenses. They hated the radiant quests. In short, they hated rebuilding and recovering. This could be because Bethesda did a pretty ham-fisted job at motivating the player to recruit and rebuild settlements, or it could be because Bethesda kind of forgot that the Fallout series, since its infancy with Interplay, was meant to be post-postÂ-apocalyptic. It was meant to be a game about a half-restored world. One only needs to look at places like Vault City or Shady Sands or even the New Vegas strip to know this. These were settlements that had rebuilt and moved on from the Great War. Bethesda has effectively abandoned this since acquiring the series, choosing instead to feature wastelands over burgeoning towns. So, while Diamond City and Bunker Hill might have running water, theyâre still using oil lamps and sleeping in drafty, scrap wood houses as if the bombs fell just a few weeks ago.
A game where survival is not nearly as hard, where you arenât grilling rabid dog meat and sleeping on a flea-infested mattress, is just not fun to most players. So, if the Fallout Civil Defense Administration had done a realistic job and cleaned all the literal skeletons out of the closet, Bethesda would have ultimately lost the one thing driving players in Fallout 4: the desire to survive.
This isnât a condemnation of Bethesda at allâin fact, modeling at Bethesda Austin is kind of my dream jobâbut it is perhaps a critical look at their failure to use civil defense properly in order to bolster a certain environment, atmosphere, and play style. We simply donât know, however, how much research and effort Bethesda (or even Interplay or Obsidian) put into civil defense. For all we know, one of their artists was simply inspired by the infamous âServing you in time of emergency!â poster and didnât think anything of it. But for a game that essentially trailblazes our pop culture understanding and opinion of nuclear warfare, itâs kind of a shame that civil defense is so overlooked. The Fallout series is almost obligated to get things right, especially when there are people who legitimately think the Vault Boy/Thumbs Up technique is a true way to measure fallout.
(It isnât. This will get you killed.)
areudirty
theartofmadeline
origamiaround
stormborns
jacobvanloon
snowghoul
gummygunk
