The nuclear war by itself in fallout isn’t what made the planet shit. The nuclear wars and non stop conflicts emerging just after the first nuclear war is what made the planet shit.
This video is analogous to the type of conflicts being fought. Everybody fighting in the soon-to-be wastelands of earths we’re using ranged weapons and vehicles across thousands of kilometres. Nukes both handheld and towed were being detonated non stop until most of earth became an irradiated hellscape. Artillery craters line every square centimetre of ground.
Based off this video, imagine the lore-accurate destruction going on at Hoover dam. NCR troopers armed with assault rifles, machine guns, artillery, trucks, and mini nukes casually blasting off at endlessly at the legion. The legion’s soldiers are also all equipped with 12.7mm machine guns, mini nukes of their own, slave armies armed with rifles, and an unholy supply of bombs being dropped. Even then, nothing amounts to the devastation caused by artillery fire and missiles being launched by the boomers behind the NCR’s frontlines.
It’s a miracle knowing the NCR even exists at times. Fallout isn’t a story about nuclear warfare. It’s a story about the noticeably worse devastation that modern warfare brings to both civilization and humanity and large.