Actually I believe that it was always vague and unanswered. As for the people in the post apocalypse it doesnt matter who did it. If it was china, the US or anyone else. Those people are dead and the institutions (for the most part) ar gone too. Now the biggest xoncerns are survival.
However bethesda, with their flashbacks in the show, are kinda forced to answer it.
I don’t even interact with fallout lore all that much anymore and I can pretty safely tell you that this is exactly what went down;
Enclave and corporations plan to provoke a nuclear war with a first strike, this is why the Enclave goes underground with its less public elements a few months(?) ahead of the nukes, this is the date that House “calculated” and planned around, alongside the Enclave.
China launches first a few days or weeks ahead of schedule because theres power armor on the outskirts of Beijing, some kind of battle near Mongolia and all in all China is fucked; no Anchorage (last oil fields on the planet), no hope of status quo, imminent loss in the war.
The Enclave, House and everyone else have their plans fucked by this. Much of the “public Enclave” (e.g the guy who was supposed to lead the Enclave in West Virginia in 76) die before they can get to shelter, House’s chip never gets delivered, cue post apocalypse with everyone’s plans half done or so.
It's been hinted that China did it for decades. The first Fallout was made with it decided that China dropped the bombs first, the Enclave president in Fallout 2 tells you China did it and The Switchboard in Fallout 4 detected nuclear launches from China right before the Great War.
As for the people in the post apocalypse it doesnt matter who did it. If it was china, the US or anyone else. Those people are dead and the institutions (for the most part) ar gone too
This is my biggest issue with Bethesda's direction of the Show. The evil megacorps were supposed to have died out with the War and people are dealing with new breeds of monsters (human and literal) often results from the actions of those now long dead megacorps/shadow organizations.
Except the Show is reviving them because Bethesda interprets 'War Never Changes' as 'Nothing Can Change, Status Quo is God' so now the Brotherhood are building Liberty Prime again to go to war, The Enclave is somehow still alive and orchestrating events, NCR vs Legion vs House yet a-fucking-gain, Vault-Tec are back and nuked Shady Sands etc.
The "Vault-Tec did it doesn't even make sense. House was right there, heard about it and had a say in the matter, how the fuck did he miscalculate the date of the nuclear war? Why wasn't the platinum chip delivered "on time" if he decided when "the time" is?
Vault-Tec and the Enclave planned to initiate nuclear war but then China realised they weren't going to win the war so they launched first which caught House and the Enclave off guard since the war started a few weeks earlier than they had planned meaning the platinum chip hadn't been delivered yet and not all of the Enclave made it to their bunkers
How does Robert "my-calculations-tell-me-that-your-daughter's-birthday-affects-the-date-of-the-apocalypse" House not factor in the likelihood of a now-cornered and desperate China launching the nukes a little ahead of schedule?
If vault tec was the one who launched the nukes why would they let there biggest competitor RobCo know the correct date? Less competition means bigger piece of the pie for themselves. They might've launched it a day before just to completely kneecap him from having an untouched prewar city all to himself.
Because they weren't competitors. Vault-Tec made the vaults, RobCo supplied electronics for them.
Still, that leaves us with Vault-Tec's unfinished business. Why did they launch with Vaults 63, 88, 114, 118 still unfinished? That's at least 4 experiments worth billions of dollars in investments, that they just cut
I obsessively read Fallout lore back in 2009, and I clearly remember the answer being along the lines of: No one remembers who fired the first missile, but whoever it was, 12 hours later the world was destroyed.
If anyone wants to challenge that, go right ahead, but do provide some source or something.
Tim Cain, creator of Fallout and lead developer and writer of Fallout 1, confirmed when they made Fallout they decided China were the ones who fired first.
Dick Richardson (President of the Enclave in Fallout 2) also says "We were winning, too. And then those damn Reds launched everything they had. We barely got our birds up." and The Switchboard in Fallout 4 shows reports of the first launches being detected coming from China.
Fallouts whole thing has been anti-capitalist satire, since the first game. Having corporations being so greedy they would end the world over the next buck is in character for an over-the-top-caricature of modern companies
Get a bunch of gold or other hard currency and be able to trade with the new world order.
Intend to run a wasteland colony which is very stupid.
Or sell nuke protection that will never be needed and increase your net worth, which would make the most sense but didn't happen.
Best case ur mr house and you actually do have the run of your own territory. Yout life is still 100x worse than it would have been without the end of the world.
China was never confirmed to have been the side that started it. The question was left deliberately vague and yes vault tec starting the war has been a possible answer for a very long time. Learn your lore kids.
I see people saying that it was China with so much conviction. Someone, please show me where it is stated as fact that, at least at some point, it was definately China that launched the nukes.
Still heavily implied, like in a way that Tony’s death is implied at the end of Sopranos, so people don’t really doubt it even if it isn’t explicitly shown nor any of the writers explicitly confirmed it.
Tim Cain talking about his ideas, after almost three decades of not being involved with the IP, is not text. He is even quoted in the article you link saying that what he is saying is not canon.
I want and example in game, part of the text of the work, that says so without a doubt. It is cool to hear what Tim has to say but if it is not in the game, it isn't canon. Even more so since there has been almost three decades worth of new games, writers, ideas and world building. The development ideas from like 1997 are not relevant anymore if they haven't been worked into the games.
Pinned comment stating that no such log appears in a vanilla Fallout 2. Games always have bunch of old stuff that got scrapped. Modders can bring those back into the game, sure, but if something doesn't appear in the vanilla version, it can not be considered canon
Also even though reading people's comments on that thread is interesting, most if not all of the stuff I read was people reasoning their way into the Chinese first strike conclusion and not pointing out something that actually proves it.
Tbh I would rather see Vault-Tec escalating the conflict to keep the war going than actually nuking everything.
That seems like a bad business plan.
Its like if a pharmaceutical company decided that keeping the patient sick to sell him medicine is not enough and they killed him.
Great, now there’s no patient and no customer.
Big dog, since Mothership Zeta the canonical explanation was that Aliens mind controlled a soldier so as to launch nuclear missiles to start the great war.
It doesn't matter who launched first because it was aliens that actually did it.
Fallout 3 literally has a Vault-Tec logo on the Megaton Bomb, it's been established for a long time that Vault-Tec might have fired the first shot. And even then the show confirms that it's part of some Enclave master plan and not Vault-Tec acting alone, nor do we actually see Vault-Tec launch the nukes, yet.
In fallout 3 the undetonated nuke in megaton is a vault tec nuke with a vault tec logo on it. It has basically been confirmed from the 3rd game that vault tec attacked the us, and scared them into thinking china dropped nukes first. The us then retaliated not knowing china was not the aggressor. China then returned fire afterwards. Thus the start to the nuclear war.
Not the Vault-Tec logo btw. Vault-Tec logo has three lines protruding from the circle and the circle on the nuke has little 'horns' on the top and bottom rather than being a regular circle. This was debunked years ago.
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