Nuclear winter

From The Vault

The general theory of a nuclear winter is, that after the explosions of a nuclear exchange have died down, the spread of smoke in the atmosphere from nuclear-started fires could reflect sunlight, darken the sky and ultimately lower the temperature of the Earth from 1 to 5 degrees Centigrade within a few months.

Since before the war, the Fallout world was more or less what the people of the 1950s thought things would be like in 2077, and not the future of our own world, there was no nuclear winter there, as that theory was put forward in our 1970s and only concretized by Carl Sagan and a team of researchers in our 1983.

The occurrence of nuclear winter is mentioned in Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel. However, this rather divergent third title is not considered part of the Fallout canon by hardcore fans.

See also: divergence