I keep mentioning Project NEPA here, but it’s not exactly well known. So, for a bit of fun I thought I’d draw out the lines connecting it with the Fallout game series’ Vault Boy mascot.

As you might guess, this whole story arc hasn’t really got a happy ending.

From the Manhattan Project to the AEC

The Manhattan Project was the top secret WWII US programme to develop nuclear weapons of war. Even though the work was spread across a large number of geographically dispersed sites, the technology goal was achieved using a tightly managed, highly compartmentalised wartime secrecy culture. Ideologically-driven administrators (in particular Major-General Leslie Groves) did what it took – and in an often direct and unaccountable way – to get the job done.

The period 1945-1947 saw (as I’ve discussed elsewhere) the US transition from this wartime secrecy silo state to a peacetime secrecy silo state. The National Security Act of 1947 took the set of practices that had evolved out of wartime secrecy silos and embodied them both in legislation and in bodies such as the CIA. So… where did all that Manhattan Project know-how go next?

The Manhattan Project’s civilian successor body was the Atomic Energy Commission, which had a chairman and five commissioners. Right from the start, AEC Commissioner Lewis Strauss often acted as a dissenting voice (e.g. being outvoted 4-1 on information security matters). Strauss believed completely that a Cold War had already started, and that the US should actively try to detect Soviet nuclear blasts (which led to Project Mogul and its successor projects).

Strauss was what you might call an “atomic maximalist”: he vigorously backed a large number of ambitious nuclear-based programmes, albeit typically by kicking the feasibility can far, far down the road. He believed that electricity generated by nuclear energy would become “too cheap to meter” (he actively backed the first US nuclear power station in Pennsylvania in 1957), and that nuclear ships and aircraft were not just possible but desirable. At the same time, he largely dismissed talk of nuclear contamination, such as after the 1954 Castle Bravo nuclear test.

But hold on… nuclear aircraft, really?

Initiated on 28th May 1946, Project NEPA was bold and audacious, if somewhat hallucinatory: it was like a post-war hi-tech programme designed by ChatGPT. Yet despite being one of the most massive tech efforts of the period, it has been somewhat airbrushed out of history: on Wikipedia, it gets no more than half a paragraph in the page devoted to its successor project ANP.

Militarily, Project NEPA was initially driven by the US Army’s Air Materiel Command, and framed by the emerging Cold War. The plan was to build nuclear-powered bombers capable of flying across continents (or even circling high over enemy continents for days or weeks) without ever refueling, all the while keeping the crew safe from radiation. The planners believed that this would give the US a permanent nuclear advantage.

But where did it come from? Surprisingly, Bernard J. Snyder’s (1996) bibliography traces the core idea right back to H. G. Wells’ (1914) “The World Set Free – A Story of Mankind“, where the author describes the (future) skies of 1943 as being filled by thousands of atomic-powered planes “humming softly”.

Back in the real world, a 1945 study (“Where We Stand”) by renowned aeronautical engineer and physicist Theodore von Kármán (commissioned by Air Materiel Command) was upbeat about nuclear aircraft. This was used by AMC to pressure Major-General Leslie Groves into creating Project NEPA. Brant Sponberg’s (1995) “Means Without an End” article noted that this got approved even though Vannevar Bush, James Conant and Robert Oppenheimer were all skeptical about the idea of nuclear aircraft.

And so Project NEPA started with a feasibility study carried out by Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corp., in space provided by the AEC at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, and with the first project funding in May 1947. A 1948 project review (the Lexington Report) concluded that it was basically sound, but would require 10-15 years and a billion dollars. And so a billion dollars was indeed spent on the dream, before it was finally cancelled in 1961 by President Kennedy.

In reality, NEPA was a ‘triumph’ of secrecy over realism, of ambition over accountability, and futurism over physics. Classified reports circulated without scrutiny, technical hurdles were treated as footnotes, and the engineers tasked with shielding, propulsion, and crash safety were constantly outflanked by administrative optimism. The program consumed massive sums of money, intellectual energy, and political capital, all in service of a vision that, by its own physics, was doomed from the start.

Honestly, Project NEPA wasn’t just big ticket technical misadventure; it was a towering monument to how not to do state-backed big science.

But what if it had succeeded?

The Fallout Universe

For the Fallout videogame series, the developers were aiming for a vibe inspired by A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), a post-apocalyptic sci-fi story by Walter M. Miller Jr. In the book, the titular Isaac Edward Leibowitz creates a monastic order in New Mexico to preserve human knowledge following the “Flame Deluge” (nuclear war). Six centuries later, Leibowitz’s 20th century notes are found in a fallout shelter, where they are considered ‘holy relics’: and so forth.

For me, though, Fallout’s “Vault Boy” who grins at you bright-eyed from a pip-boy screen is like the cheerful ghost of Project NEPA. He embodies all the hubris, spin, technological impossibility, madness, lies, and deception: he embodies the stupid political dream of 1945-1947 that, somehow, physics was wrong and their whole anticommunist Cold War ideology was right. He is AEC Commissioner Lewis Strauss’ poster boy for the nuclear reactor in every home, the cheerily polished technological turd.

I mean, thousands of nuclear reactors “humming softly” in the sky, what could possibly go wrong?