In the finale of the Amazon series Fallout, it is revealed that the nuclear war was started by Vault Tec and other multinational corporations in order to “clean up the surface of their enemies” and emerge from the Vaults even richer than before.
But why? They had already won before the war! The United States is bankrupt after 10 years of war with China and has sold everything it could to multinational corporations. Life in the US is still pleasant, it’s not a war zone: movies are made, children’s parties are held, people live in villas with swimming pools, billionaires are still billionaires. The pre-war world of Fallout is a world where, even more than ours, capitalism has won and corporations thrive!
And they decide to put an end to all this in order to… lock themselves underground for centuries, living a life much worse than before, with no certainty of survival and, in the best case scenario, emerging into a depopulated, desert wasteland?
What kind of stoned intern prepared the PowerPoint for this business plan?
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Corporate greed knows no bounds
If they crunched the numbers and found nuking the world increases the company coffers by 3%, that’s probably why they went for it
I should point out that the nuclear war wasn’t necessarily started by Vault-Tec, but that they INTENDED to. Who actually fired first was unknown, because virtually everyone was ready to.
As to why, because they didn’t want to lose money. Imagine investing trillions into post-war survival and rebuilding only for everyone to make up, shake hands, and back down. They needed investors, and why would anyone invest in a reality that might not come? They reached out to everyone who wanted a head-start on the post war world that was CERTAINLY coming, and promised that their investment wouldn’t go to waste, even if they had to take matters into their own hands.
The idea is that Vault-Tec would be the dominant power in the world after the nukes. Freezing away all the executives in order to own everything once the world recovered.
I think they greatly underestimated how devastating the end of the world would be but most of them are still frozen in vault 3(1?)
It theoretically even explains all the experiments performed in the vaults as they wanted to devise new ways to control people.
The Enclave and corporate powers didn’t want a share of the wealth of the old world, no matter how big it was. They wanted to create entirely new societies of their own design, cleansed from what came before.
Just that things didn’t go quite to plan for most. But hey, at least the big brains at Big MT got to have centuries of ethics-free science experimentation with unlimited test subjects.
I think the major thing is that this was a decision made based on the idea that the Vault system would work 100% like intended, every single time, experiments and control Vaults and all, which would in theory make the rich people Vaults wake up and conquer the new world.
I think what actually killed it was the fact that they had no idea how utterly devastating the apocalypse would actually be. Very typical plan vs punch to the face kind of dissonance.
Well that’s because Vault-Tec was just part of a bigger whole. The Enclave wasn’t just business interests, but also the deep state and the military industrial complex, who saw the writing on the wall and wanted to fuck off into space. Hence the vault experiments testing different conditions and how to deal with them (isolation, lack of resources, inbreeding, radiation exposure, etc). This was the canon until Fallout 2.
Then by Fallout 3 the Enclave’s plan seems to have been to just come out on top by leveling everything and starting with a clean slate on the other side. Remove even the veneer of a civilian government and just become the ubersmench ruling over whatever vaults were left.
They may be planning to reveal something similar in the show. Where it’s not just corporations but all levels of government and the military industrial complex conspiring together to rule over the ashes, which would be in line with nuking the NCR, the only legitimate threat to their power post-war.
At some point the only way to become richer becomes making everyone else poorer.
You’re missing an important detail. All of these corporations were tricked & manipulated by the Enclave.
https://youtu.be/41i-hSh4Rgs?si=a1ToV5FCj4nxmuJ1
Around the 2:20 you can see Barb get a message and look up.
The scene simplifies it, but basically, no one in that room thought they were going to be a victim, and they were promised an anarcocapitalist paradise after the bombs dropped.
It’s only revealed that vault-tec had the idea to start the war, but we don’t yet know whether they actually did it or not.
(Evidence against it is that the woman who proposed it wasn’t actually with her daughter when the bombs dropped – if she knew the war was about to kick off she would have made sure her daughter was safe and sound with her in the vault)
Vault tec didn’t actually drop the bombs. In fact, it’s very likely the chinese did, considering they were getting stomped in beijing.
Besides, there were actually riots across america prewar because of the resource shortages and shit. fallout 4 goes into this a couple of times in the background lore that you can find and at the start of the game.
The fallout universe is in the beginning to middle of a collapse, Europe has fallen apart in a hot war with the middle east, Africa barely gets mentioned but it’s probably similar and America is actively invading China and occupying Canada, the world is ultimately doomed as no one can stop any of this, the reality is that the bombs by now are near inevitable, riots are starting across America, Labour riots and various other forms of unrest are starting, the USA can’t survive in its current form for much longer.
Various groups know this, all linked somewhat to the enclave (a organisation within the USA government focused on its survival at all costs), all planning now for the end, but we have lots of evidence to suggest vault tec and the enclave were caught off guard, with the main vault control station unfinished and various bunkers being built disconnected from control station enclave rendering the wider vault programme useless to anyone.
It’s highly probable following the fall of Beijing, the People’s Republic of China saw it was doomed and was going to collapse from internal revolt and American troops marching inland and so launched its arsenal at the USA and it’s few remaining allies, and so the collapse rapidly hit the final stages, cities burned, agriculture collapsed and radiation rain killed billions.
Tl;DR the end was inevitable, it doesn’t matter who pulled the trigger
Because it’s never about having enough, it’s about wanting more.
The cabal of business executives reached an illogical decision to encourage a nuclear war, because they failed to follow through the reasoning a few steps further.
Their idea was: We invested a lot of money into preparing to survive a nuclear war. If that war doesn’t happen, this money was wasted. Therefore we need a war.
But there’s something they failed to consider, which should be extremely obvious to any normal person: A nuclear war will damage the planet so much that most of what you could buy with money is eliminated. The executives’ own standards of luxury living will go down, because now they exist in a fallout world full of sand, junk, and killer mutants.
It would be more enjoyable to be a billionaire in the healthy pre-war America than a warlord king in fallout land. But they didn’t understand that, because they’re cartoonishly evil.
They were planning, but didn’t do it because they weren’t prepared
Because they didn’t just want extreme influence over the USA, they wanted total control of the world. Which means the other powers needed to go, along with the US government. Corporations won, sure, but they could have more. And if it means the plebs die then who cares? Their plan was to go into stasis while their minions get everything ready for them to emerge as the new god-kings of humanity.
But from what’s been shown in the show and games it all went to shit. As Vault-Tec’s plans rather often do. The nukes launched early(Hence House being caught with his pants down and the executive’s daughter being outside the Vaults) and didn’t wipe out everyone but their chosen few. Meanwhile the Wasteland ended up overrun with monsters and the FEV isn’t working like they want it to work, meaning that the long term radiation is a big problem.
I know you put everything in spoilers, but I feel like that’s not going to fly anymore now, so I’m going to skip the spoiler tags in my response. Mods, if you disagree, please let me know and I’ll happily edit.
As has already been mentioned, Vault Tec may be leading the charge in that meeting but it was the Enclave pulling the strings in the background for their own nefarious purposes, which may or may not have involved leaving the planet altogether.
But, and this is important: we still don’t know if Vault Tec was the actual group that pulled the trigger. The lore in the games is deliberately vague, and we never actually see the button pushed in the show. There are contradictory reports all over the game lore — deliberately so.
Of additional importance: Robert House is in the meeting and knows Vault Tec is going to drop the bombs. But he gets caught with his pants down because the bombs fell earlier than he believed they would. House having not completed his plans before the bombs dropped is the main driver of the plot of Fallout: New Vegas. So if Vault Tec did drop the bombs, they did it early and didn’t inform House.
But it’s just as plausible that the Chinese pulled the trigger as the US advanced on Beijing, as there was still a bloody ground war going on the whole time, right up until the end of the world. There’s also evidence that Aliens did it, in Fallout 3’s DLC Mothership Zeta, but there’s also evidence that this was cut (poorly) by Bethesda, to the point where it’s vague enough that it could be true, or not. There’s also the very faint possibility that the whole thing is a shared simulation, hinted at in Fallout 76’s Enclave terminals.
Point is: we still don’t know who done it. Vault Tec clearly planned to, but did they pull it off? The magic 8 ball says “Cannot Predict Now”.
Different priorities, basically.
Before the nuclear war, Vault-Tec had more money than they knew what to do with, and employees could enjoy all the worlds luxuries (as much as you can with cold war paranoia going on.)
After the nuclear war, though, Vault-Tec had the ability to remake society in their own image. A lot of the plot beats in the Fallout TV show are devoted to their obsession with “management”. It’s revealed that Vaults 33 and 32 have always been managed by former Vault-Tec employees hiding in Vault 31. Shady Sands was also nuked by former Vault-Tec employees to blunt the development of human societies outside the control of Vault-Tec.
By bringing armageddon, Vault-Tec has shifted from being a corporation focused on profit to an organization attempting to have complete control over society.
Clarification: We don’t actually know Vault-Tec dropped the first bomb yet, we just know they posited “what if we did”. Prevailing theory still says China shot first after the tide turned in Alaska and they were pushed all the way back to Beijing.
There’s also the whole race to the bottom mentality: if we don’t start the Armageddon now then someone else might do it later, losing our competitive advantage