I could slug a few people here right now.
Let me point out to people that Fallout is generally what a sci-fi author of that time would have written about. Since more of the reading audience would have been familiar (especially those in Britain, even through passed down stories and a lot of reels about the subject) with bombs dropping and the fright it prompted into the general populace, more authors would saved the rockets for space exploration and used more conventional methods for depicting how the world is going to hell, as they need some basis the public is aware of without using media whore material. Hey, bombers weren't thought of much a threat because the US was getting a bit more air superiority vs. bombers then, and it would have brought back feelings of Pearl Harbor. So therefore the idea of bombers carpet bombing a country again, of this size, would seem a bit ludicrous when given the alternatives.
They didn't want to constantly remind people that missiles were capable of taking out their neighborhood from a few minutes away. That was a bad thing to really fictionalize with at that time among some audiences, left for later times after the CMC sort of cooled down (relatively speaking). More of the nuke ICBM scare stuff was done in more conventional comic pulps, mainly to whore out their characters (many did this entirely too shamelessly). Many authors stayed away from this topic mainly out of good taste to their audience. They already were saturated enough of that, they didn't need any more of it. Some were gross media whores, but others had a bit of respect for their audience and material.
The style of Fallout was in the tone of the darker comics of that time, not the flashy Fantastic Four style, as can be seen by some of the loading screens and styles of some in-game books, and of course the darker nature of the game. The darker ones of a sci-fi nature, tended to go for harshness (people often died), but they were also starting to appeal to more people as a genre (after all, the 60's are a time when Star Trek was aired and was leaning against the cigar rockets with a modified saucer design). I'll have to dig some of those out of storage and see if I can scan in the covers.
Anyways, there's a whole mix of things involved with the setting, but apparently missiles weren't part of the equasion, because of a main aspect of the setting that also makes me laugh about the orbital station location for Fo3. To get there would involve fuel, and considering that they didn't have fusion-powered rockets to deliver missiles in surprise (each with a Stealth-Boy attached to it), I wouldn't put much faith for someone in the post-apocalyptic world to find a working rocket to go spacewalking, much less their...descent.
