When It All Changed: The Early History of the Fallout Universe

 Fallout Season Two's teaser just dropped, and I'm busy playing Fallout 76 at the same time that I'm in a Fallout TTRPG campaign - so I suppose it's time to take a look at the mysteries surrounding the origins the Fallout universe - in-universe.

The games are all set on or after the nukes dropping - October 23, 2077.  In fact, the only glimpse that we've really had (apart from audio recordings or text) of the world prior to that date has been in the TV show, and even that has been only a few years prior.   Prior to about 2020, it really starts to get rather hazy. So, like others before me, I want to speculate about how Fallout became... well, Fallout!  And that's looking at two questions:

1)  When Did It Change (more precisely, when did it deviate greatly from regular history)?

2) Why is technology the way it is by the Great War? 

Let's start with the first question.  Kenneth Hite noted that alternate histories can have small changes and large changes - the small changes being things like "our world plus these fictional characters / corporation / small nation".  History is basically the same, overall, but there can be events that are either small-time or are hidden (like a conspiratorial history).  The large changes are the more familiar alternate realities of "similar, but differnent" - worlds where the Nazis win (Wolfenstein) or magic returns (Shadowrun) or the forces of evil are unleashed upon the world (Deadlands), to name a few.  In most of these cases, there's a point where history is the same, basically, and where it goes off the rails.  It can be a singular event, or a certain period of time.

For Fallout, we know the basic range.  From the references to various presidents, we haven't seen any real deviation from George Washington all the way to FDR.  

(I'm also ignoring the "Nixon doll" from Fallout 2)  

Event-wise, we know that World War Two still happened, and it ended with the atomic bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - assuming the dates are the same, we can assume, then, that August 9, 1945 is our lower limit.

On the other end, we have the record of the first American in space - Captain Carl Bell of the United States Space Administration, in the Defiance 7 space capsule, on May 5, 1961.  In the real world, the date is the same but it was Alan Shepard aboard the Freedom 7.  All the Mercury space capsules ended in "7", and while we don't know if they used that project name, there is also another known capsule in the same program - Clarabella 7, which was captured by aliens and covered up.  (Fallout 76 also recently confirmed that the first animal in space was Mister Pebbles, the cat featured on posters since Fallout 4)

Further down the line, the first American moon landing is on July 16 1969 via the Valiant 11 - the date that Apollo 11 launched from Earth in the real world.  Not only is the program name different, the three astronauts having different names, but also the flag itself is different because something happened earlier that year: 

The United States split into thirteen Commonwealths - while the states still apparently existed, there was a new subfederal level of government.  We'll return to that. 

Let's go back to the time frame in question - 1945 to 1961.  What could have happened during this time to start this?  Well, let's look at some of the clues that we have here:

First, there's the fact that NASA in the Fallout universe is replaced with the US Space Administration.  NASA had a predecessor agency - NACA, a civilian agency dedicated to aviation technology - but here, we have something new. NASA was formed in 1958; the USSA's space program seems about the same in 1961 and slightly ahead in 1969.

Second, we do know that the United Nations was created because it is dissolved in 2052; its headquarters seem to be in the same location.  This, unfortunately, is less helpful than it seems as the charter for the UN was actually signed in 1945 before the war even ended.

Third, there's this guy:

Nikola Tesla gets mentioned a lot in Fallout for a guy who died in 1943; there's the armor, there's the magazine, there's the general technology.  Tesla is often the go-to guy for weird science in alternate histories (I'm not immune to using him myself).  It seems as if his technological advances were embraced more in Fallout's history than our own, which would involve electronics and energy transmission.

So we have a lot of the pieces in place, but there doesn't seem to be enough to really make any real decisions.  Am I forgetting anything?

Oh, yeah, those guys.  The aliens - the Zetans - who have been visiting Earth and abducting people since at least 1692.  With the 1950s vibe that Fallout exudes, there's one logical place that we can tie a lot of this together - and that's the classic UFO conspiracy, the Roswell Incident in the summer of 1947.  There have been a number of instances of crashed Zetan scoutships across the Earth (maybe something within our atmosphere?) in the Fallout games, so why not one way back when?  So, assuming this, what can derive?

For whatever reason, Tesla's discoveries are found to be compatible with the alien technology, allowing the United States to start making significant technological advances - however, the downside is that by relying on this technological path, they never develop the transistor, allowing for the miniaturization of electronics - at least not until well in the 21st century.  

There is also a scientific/military group that keeps this secret - the equivalent of Majestic 12, the supposed secret group that hid the existence of UFOs.  Sounds a lot like the Enclave, right?  Well, not exactly - I'll get to that next time.

Tensions rise much higher between the United States and the Soviet Union; the latter never collapses, still existing at the time of the Great War (but not the chief enemy of the US, and I'll get to that as well).

So, what is the business with all the Commonwealths?  There's precedent - in the Twilight: 2000 TTRPG, when the threat of war arises, the United States is split up into military regions for administrative purposes - and when the military and civilian governments split, the civilian government maintains control of at least two of them.  In the real world, President Eisenhower established the interstate highway system in part for military reasons - having highways for internal movement of supplies and troops in case of war (while the myth of 'every five miles have to be straight so aircraft can land' has been repeatedly debunked, the official record tends to downplay the discussion of military use in its development in the 50s in favor of emphasizing its civilian use).  Cranked to eleven, the elevated and constant fear of a war with the Soviet Union - and China - might have then led to an official series of regions designed to have a strong regional support for military control in case of war - thought to be inevitable - with a civilian government maintaining it in the meantime.  Of course, there was probably a great deal of political jockeying for drawing these lines, which may have been arbitrary from the public's point of view.

Okay, so we've got something of a foundation here - but what happened next, in the gap of time from 1969 to 2020?  Why isn't technology more advanced?  Was there a major war, and if so, how did it not devolve into a nuclear holocaust then?  Why are all the major corporations of Fallout mostly founded in the 21st century?  What are the real origins of Vault-Tec and the Enclave?

I've got a few ideas on that score, but I'll save that for next time...