It's a very solid idea but no, they didn't intend for any bombs to be dropped. Both the US government and Vault Tec believed that no bombs would be dropped, which is why the US government ordered Vault Tec to only create 122 vaults.

Then why did they create these places as fallout shelters?(which obviously are built to protect against global annihilation.) If secrecy and environment control are key factors for these types of ethically controversial experiments then why are most in FO4 so easily spotted? People clearly knew these existed before the bombs dropped. They were in plain site and they were advertised to the public, as fallout shelters. You don't build a fallout shelter if you don't believe bombs will drop and you don't build a fallout shelter with highly technical social experiments if you aren't certain they will be used. ps. sorry for all the questions. Vault-Tec is so interesting to me.

Haha don't be sorry Vault Tec is very interesting. Nuclear annihilation was very widespread amongst the population, similar to the real life Second Red Scare. Vault Tec and the government to advantage of the idea of people being isolated underground and it was the perfect opportunity to conduct experiments for research. Honestly I have no idea what Vault Tec planned to do with said research...they're -blam!-ed up in the brain. A lot of it was for combat improvements but some of the experiments were just exotic and ridiculous.

That makes sense. This is the first Fallout I've played so I'm kind of a noob to this world, hence all the questions. I'm sure there's a lot that is revealed about VT in the other games. Did you play the others?

Yup. First one I ever played was 3 and then I played the others. I highly recommend playing Fallout 3 btw.