There is currently a TV series on Amazon Prime called 'Fallout'; which is set inside the general universe of the Fallout series of games by Bethesda.
From what I have seen of the trailers and propaganda, it retains the 1950s Atomicpunk vibe of the games but moves the soundtrack beyond the 1950s to include the 1960s as well. In the light of this, I was asked to write a piece on the likelihood of surviving an all out nuclear war.
As yet, the only two nuclear bombs ever dropped in warfare were so horrific to the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that world leaders were quite rightly very very scared and loathe to use them again. Given that we will never really know how close we got to nuclear war, thankfully we never really tested this. Perhaps the closest that the world ever got, was either during the Cuban Missile Crisis at the end of 1962, or the Able Archer exercises in 1983. I think that what is really curious about both of those cases is that it was the Russian Submarine Captain who was in charge of a fully-armed and operational nuclear platform and the East German Ministry of Defence who showed restraint and did not push the button. This means that any and all moral argument of the righteousness of the West, is functionally bunk.
As for the technical questions about whether or not people would survive a nuclear war, then the answer to that as with most cases of military aggression directed at civilian populations, is mostly 'no'. Despite what the eejits in the United States might tell you, there are no defensive uses of a gun. All projectile weapons only telos is to kill people. Failure to kill people, is a failure of the weapon to fulfil its intended function. So it is with nuclear weapons. They are designed to kill people, very efficiently. In many instances within the blast zones of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the efficiency was so exact, that they didn't merely kill people but utterly vaporized them and the only evidence that they were ever there were shadows left behind in the heat. But in case you are interested, here are some technical details of the human body which are useful.
Humans are electromechanical devices, with meat wrapped around a calcium carbonate structure; which are then driven by a salty thought muscle and however the human soul is attached therein. This means that as devices go, humans are actually pretty fragile things. Humans possess the ability to do damage to each other, and not just bruising, by use of simple machines which improve the mechanical advantage of what little power humans can actually generate. If you give a human a club, or a sword, they can pierce and slice flesh and break bones.
You average human contains a calcium carbonate structure, which is encased in meat. Those bones which are mineral in nature, are very good in dealing with compression forces but not particularly brilliant with tension forces. If a point force is directed at a human bone encased in meat, then the speed at which it will nominally break is just 13km/h. This explains why in car parks, traffic designers want you to crawl around at 10km/h. For children, the impact speed for a point force is marginally higher but no more than about 20%. This explains why broken bones can occur on the sporting field, or why people can break their bones after falling over from relatively small heights. The fun thing about a nuclear blast though, is that it can travel at many hundreds of kilometres per hour. Admittedly a blast will cover far more than just a point but people tend to live in environments where there are buildings and in a nuclear blast there will be many random parts and pieces and objects which are thrown by the nuclear blast at people. Broken bones are therefore, the first consequence of a nuclear weapon.
That meat is also encased in a layer of skin. Although that skin is stretchy and flexible, it too has limits. Everything living thing is mostly made of just four chemical elements; these being Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen and Oxygen. The fun thing about those four elements is that when you apply enough heat to then, then chemistry happens. When we apply enough heat to other living things (which we have made dead), then that chemistry which happens is sometimes delicious. The problem is that when you do delicious chemistry to living things which we have not made dead, then the result is unpleasant. If we apply enough heat to living things which we have not made dead, then we can make them dead. Human skin tends to burn at about 70°C. Human flesh tends to cook at about 150°C. Burning skin and cooked flesh are suboptimal when it comes to a human remaining alive.
Human skin in addition to being stretchy and flexible, reaches a point when that stretch and flexibility reaches its material limit. Humans can find this out pretty easily by accidentally cutting themselves with knives or paper (or deliberately). It is possible to lacerate skin with any object that moves faster than about 20km/h.
All of these things happen simultaneously in a nuclear detonation. If a 1 Megaton weapon detonates less than a 1000 metres above the ground, then everything within about 8 kilometres will be instantly vapourised. Beyond that, skin will burn, the fats in people will also burn, flesh will cook; and that's before you start adding effects such as every single combustible object also burning, metals melting, and the shock wave throwing glass, metal, wood, stone,. whatever, at people at hundreds of kilometers an hour.
I have no doubt that if there was a full-on nuclear war, then cities would be targeted and many thousands of nuclear devices would be dropped simultaneously. For big population centres like New York, Tokyo, London, Beijing, et cetera, you could probably expect tens of millions of people to be vapourised in less than a minute. Beyond that, the fallout and clouds which would likely envelop the earth, would likely be enough to make practically every plant on earth fail, and if anyone did actually survive, then they would likely either eventually starve to death or suffer the ongoing effects of radiation which would continue well beyond the lifetimes of anyone alive at the time. A full-on nuclear war is a civilisation termination event and possibly an omnicidal extinction event.
I have not seen Fallout on Amazon Prime but we can be reasonably safe in assuming that this is purely a work of not even speculative fiction. The more likely scenario given the events in the first episode is that everyone and everything would be dead; there would be no survivors in any of the blast zones and everyone else would have long since starved to death.
For the protagonist of The Ghoul, we can assume that as he survived the blast, he was not in the immediate zone of vapourisation. However, he would have likely died from extensive third-degree burns and be blinded as his eyeballs would have burned his retinas due to the focussing action of his corneas (that is of course if his eyeballs themselves didn't simulaneously explode and/or haemorrage.
As for the protagonist of Lucy MacLean, we can assume that as she lived in a Vault, that she would have survived. That is except for one problem; her 7x great-grandparents would not have survived. Lucy therefore would not exist.
The lore is such that these Vaults are sufficiently far enough underground, that layers of earth would be enough to protect them. Indeed, if there was a full-on nuclear war, then in most cities you would be best advised to seek shelter in the deep level subway and underground railway stations. You can basically assume that the trains will never run again and that the power stations which are used to power the trains will never work again; so the risk of electrocution from overhead power lines and/or third rail would be minimal. Then again, the intense heat and the fact that there would be so much oxygen demanded by everything being on fire would mean that if you actually were in a central train station, then you would be suffocated as well as roasted.
I see no possible way that given the scenario of the general universe of the Fallout series, that there would be anyone alive to tell the tale; anywhere on the face of the earth. This makes for a fun video game and a fun television series but the real world implications are so horrific and so terrible as to render it actually impossible.
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