We know that most of New Vegas was spared being destroyed by the atomic warheads.
We know that Mr. House had constructed laser defenses, missile arrays and radar jamming systems to achieve this.
So why didn't the USA government do the same thing for all of their cities or at least most?
The USA wanted to see China and the rest of communism get mostly annihilated, sure, they would suffer and lose most of their own citizens as well but that was seen as an acceptable trade-off.
Then they would regroup, restore the United States and crush any remnants of communism for good.
So why didn't they, instead of constructing very expensive vaults that had to be self-sustainable, not just outfit their cities with laser defenses?
Then they could have preserved most of their nation's population and could strike just after the communists were devastated and at their lowest point.
This can't have been too expensive, lasers were pretty common, radar jamming was used at least since World War 2 so that is very old tech and missile arrays shouldn't be too expensive either.
Most vaults were already completed by 2063, Robert House had only started to work on preserving New Vegas in 2062.
And how come the supposedly omnipresent United States government didn't see House's plan (constructing laser defenses in a populated city would be strange after all) and think "Hey, that's a good idea."
Anyway, first time poster here.