In Fallout‘s first season on Prime Video, we seemingly learned who dropped the nuclear bombs that began The Great War. Only, it wasn’t quite the confirmation we first thought. Sure, we heard Barb Howard say Vault-Tec would kick off nuclear war on its own, but we never saw the company do it. The series’ showrunners then said that revelation about who started the Great War in Fallout “might be definitive” or “it might not be.” Now, Fallout season two has confirmed we still don’t know who pressed the button that ended the world and dropped those nuclear bombs. It’s a major Fallout mystery that is now more intriguing than ever, because not even Robert House could solve it.
Mr. House Sheds Doubt On Who Dropped the Bombs in Fallout Season 2
Fallout season two showed us what happened when Cooper Howard met the real Robert House in Vegas during an incredible pre-war flashback. Coop wasn’t there to kill the dangerous RobCo founder like Miss Williams/Moldaver wanted. Instead, he planned to steal the cold fusion tech Barb was planning to sell to Mr. House. House said cold fusion was the key to so many of his plans. It would allow him to live indefinitely, “robot-icize” himself into a non-biological form, and keep his city safe from the nuclear war House believed inevitable.
Coop didn’t believe House’s computers could predict the future with such accuracy and that House might just be a “f***ing lunatic.” But Fallout: New Vegas players know House’s calculations about when the bombs will drop, and the Great War will begin, ultimately prove to be off by just 20 hours. The world will end soon after this meeting with the “killer” masquerading as a cowboy. The question—still/once again/maybe always—is who will be the person who starts the end. Who ultimately drops the nuclear bombs in Fallout‘s world?
Mr. House Doesn’t Believe Vault-Tec Drops the Nuclear Bombs and Starts Fallout‘s Great War
Mr. House told Coop he’s positive it won’t be Vault-Tec on the whole that begins the Great War. He said the company is just a bunch of bureaucrats clashing, so despite what they both heard Coop’s wife say at that clandestine meeting, he’s already eliminated Vault-Tec as the eventual button pusher and nuclear bomb dropper. That doesn’t rule out Vault-Tec entirely, but House is very smart. If he’s confident Vault-Tec won’t be the one to drop the bombs on Fallout, we’d wager he’s right.
Mr. House didn’t rule out Barb herself, though. Just because Vault-Tec might not want to end the world despite planning for it, one of its employees could go rogue. House didn’t even technically rule out Cooper Howard, himself, since his sudden appearance in the data pushed House’s calculations back an entire month. The birth of Cooper Howard’s daughter, Janey, is also connected to the inevitability of nuclear war in Fallout. Mr. House can’t figure out how Cooper factors into the end of the world, which means he can’t rule out Cooper as the deciding factor in when and how the nuclear bombs drop.
So, Who Drops the Bombs and Starts the Great War on Fallout? Mr. House Believes It’s Whoever Made Deathclaws
It seems unlikely that any member of the Cooper household will ultimately push the button that initiates nuclear armageddon, though. Especially, Barb. (If she did, why wasn’t Janey inside a vault when the Great War starts?) Instead, House believes it will be a mysterious person who remains inexplicably/frustratingly unknown to him. House believes there’s “another player at the table,” someone he has yet to identify. But House thinks he does know something about this shadowy figure who seems to sit above all other powers in the world. It’s not just somehow capable of hiding even from the (almost) all-knowing eyes of Robert House. In Fallout season two, Mr. House reveals that he believes the person who will drop the nuclear bombs and start the Great War is the person who made Deathclaws.
House said that, although he was not physically present, he was in Alaska with Coop during the Battle of Alaska, thanks to the technology he gave West Tek to use in its power armor. That’s how he saw “the demon in the snow.” And House thinks the person or people responsible for that monstrosity in Fallout‘s world is also the secret entity he can’t yet account for, the one he fears will kick off nuclear war.
Who could that possibly be? United States government scientists created Deathclaws, possibly using research taken from (provided by?) the group that took control over after the nuclear bombs fell, the Enclave. We saw in Fallout season one that the shadow organization ultimately eventually got its hands on cold fusion. The Enclave is also the most evil powerful, ubiquitous organization in the Fallout video games, so it would make sense if the Enclave or one of its members dropped the nuclear bombs. If anyone could both hide from Mr. House and detonate a nuclear weapon, it’s the members of the Enclave who served in the United States government prior to The Great War. They were the people who couldn’t wait to reshape the world…
But IS the Enclave Responsible for the Great War on Fallout?
The very reasons the Enclave seems like the most obvious (only?) candidate for Mr. House’s mystery player on Fallout are also why it’s hard to believe he wouldn’t know about them. The Enclave had many members, and the more people who know a secret, the harder it is to keep. Could they really pull that off without Robert House not knowing what they were up to?
Which brings us back to the question we thought we got an answer to in season one. It’s the question that haunts House. The same one that had Coop chugging liquor on that elevator. It’s the question that looms over this dystopian wasteland: “Who ends the world?” Fallout still hasn’t told us. But it has made that world-destroying question feel more important than ever.
Fallout season two is now airing on Prime Video.
Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist. He would never work for the Enclave. He would work for Mr. House, though. You can follow him on Bluesky at @burgermike. And also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.