About the Vaults

On to a little something about the Vaults, since that's where it all started for me. Well, so I thought, at least, but that's another story.

Back when it looked like things were getting ready to go to Hell, the government commissioned a group named Vault-Tec to develop an underground shelter designed to house 1000 people for 10 years following a nuclear exchange. The Vaults had all the major amenities, as well as the supplies necessary to start up a small settlement once the radiation had cleared up.

That was the plan, in any case. Due to the usual human error many vaults were over-or-under-supplied, and as a result not all vaults survived the attack. At least one Vault is known to have suffered a direct hit, with catastrophic results for those inside.

Officially, the Vaults were nuclear shelters designed to protect the American population from nuclear holocaust. However, with a population of almost 400 million by 2077, the U.S. would need nearly 400,000 Vaults, while Vault-Tec was commissioned to build only 122 such Vaults.

The real reason for the existence of these Vaults was to study preselected segments of the population to see how they react to the stresses of isolationism and how successfully they re-colonize Earth after the Vault opened. It's disturbing to think that even in the face of a nuclear holocaust the people in charge were more interested in using the rest of us as their lab rats rather than trying to protect us from their stupidity.

How do I know this? A lot of things survived the war, and the old United States shadow government, known now as the Enclave, liked to keep tidy records of their projects and plans. You'll be hearing about them in the next installment.