?

No one's mentioned Vault-Tec.

There is some dialog in Fallout 2 referencing China's fate.

Dick Richardson: "There was a great war long before we were born. Our gallant soldiers fought from the Yukon to the Yangtze."

The Chosen One: "Yeah, I knew about that part. Go on."

Dick Richardson: "We were winning, too. And then those damn Reds launched everything they had. We barely got our birds up."

The Chosen One: "Doesn't seem as though it helped us much."

Dick Richardson: "Well, no it didn't. But at least it knocked the damn Red menace back into the stone age."

Could be possible but that dialogue is just him being an optimist and a dick

Well duh his name is literally Dick Dickson.

It's the American version of Dicky McDickface.

In a similarly poor state as the US or much worse probably. The Yangtze Valley, China's traditional heartland was directly invaded during the resource wars which would be far worse than Alaska getting attacked (especially as without Deng the third most important region to modern China, the Pearl River Delta probably wouldn't get developed and it's likely Beijing and Manchuria were hit hard when coal started running out), basically their silicone valley or fusion city or what have you probably never existed, their New York was invaded and sacked and their DC and lakes cities were probably in dire straits before the war even began. I'd suspect that it collapsed into a new warlord era if much of anything survived at all.

There's some old Cano or Cano adjacent stuff that implies it like most of Eurasia is buried under ice. Though I'm not fond of this explanation tbh.

The worst ideacame from Fallout Extreme tho with the Taiwanese coming back to the mainland and installing a new emperor which tbh is horrendously laughable to anyone with even a basic understanding of Chinese history (like seriously the Guomindang and CPC spawned from the same revolutionary coalition that yeeted Puyi off the throne and one of the few things they can both agree on is Qing bad Sun Yat Sen good) and the way it gets treated makes it worse with cringy insensitivity and laughably outdated Orientalist tropes. Seriously fuck Fallout Extreme.

I go along with MM and Appalachian. The chinese are probably much much worse off. The chinese developed an H bomb much later than the USSR and US, and so it was very possibly a technology lag that caused the Chinese performance in the Great war to be so chaotic. We know 77 warheads targeted Las Vegas, and yet only one for Boston, which was way off course, with one malfunctioning missile in submarine Yangtze's tubes.

If the world went all in on nukes then military thinking would likely not be solely a deterrent, but lean more to the way MacArthur thought about them. Thinking practically, they would have analyzed the danger that carpet bombing china with nuclear weapons would produce on the US's population. For this reason, The US may very well have carpet bombed with enhanced radiation weapons (ERWs aka Neutron bombs) with very short half life isotopes so that china's population would be almost eliminated without the attendant high altitude soot from incinerated cities causing a nuclear winter, or the radioactive particles making their way back to US territories.

The quirky thing about this is that if the entire country was carpet bombed with equidistantly placed mirved warheads, then China would be intact without anyone left alive. Though ironic, if this scenario played out, then China would be most likely invaded by whichever non aligned countries survived with surface shipping able to move large numbers of settlers.

Shanghai is renamed New Auckland?

"Thinking practically"

That's where your otherwise great theory falls apart. As a quick look at the Enclave, which is the U.S. government both Post-War and a bit Pre-War as well, will tell you, the U.S. government did not think practically. Hell, given how much nuclear waste is casually thrown everywhere Pre-War it's debatable if anyone was thinking practically.

Well, the nuclear waste situations are frequently associated with nefarious businesses, eg the proprietor of Concord Red Rocket.

No, I think the weakness in that scenario is that we dont see any evidence of ERWs ("neutron") warheads- instead we see dirty bombs like the Fatman nuke, and W28 tactical nukes that Liberty prime tosses. This is largely driven not by military logic but by entertainment value that Bethesda naturally sees in explosion fireballs - preferring spectacle over the insignificant boom of an ERW where there is no physical crumbling of anything but everyone nearby mysteriously falls dead.

Further, the number of missiles required for carpet bombing would dictate that SSBMS like USS Democracy at Far Harbor's Nucleus have far more than 4 missile tubes. Admitedly there is not much military logic to 4 tubes in an SSBM regardless of whether this ERW hypothesis has any merit. In real life with conventional nukes, USSR Typhoon class (eg Kursk) have 20 tubes. Ohio class have 24. Anyway, carpet bombing with ERWs as described even with massive Mirving would require much more enormous subs or something like towed underwater barges with 100s of tubes that would be stealthily towed onto station then anchored and remotely fired. The evidence from USS Democracy and Yangtse is very low numbers of tubes. Again- the logic of game design cost benefit rather than scifi principle drives the reality we see: Obviously, fitting the USS Democracy into the Nucleus would be a nightmare of excess polygons with little entertainment payoff if it had 100 tubes.

Crater

Pretty sure that China jus got absolutely clapped when the bombs dropped.