Well a blimp can be seen for miles, and any fool with a rocket launcher can take one out. Planes on the other hand, are deadly, but need ground co-ordination. Huh, well war was never easy, unless you nuke everything.
Could do like the germans did with the zeppelins in WW1 when they bombed the UK - fly over the clouds at night and drop bombs. The brits didn't know how to take them down, they didn't see them and the planes at the time couldn't take them down... untill some pilot had an SMG loaded with incendiary ammo or something, flew passed the zeppelin and unloaded a few magazines. After a few tries, the zeppelin caught fire and went down like the Hindenburg.
God I love zeppelins!
Sorry It's just that I always see Vietnam as the end of American Euphoria which fuels the 1950's and subsequently Fallout's Universe. I might be wrong though.
This.
After WW2, America was at the top of popularity in Europe, we've been "saved from evil" twice (after some major persuasion). The wars America fought after that just degraded the popularity everywhere, and now people just go "oh, the world police".
But isn't America supposed to be disliked and without allies by the time of the Great War? Then this would make sense if they fought these wars anyways, 100+ years of less and less popularity. But these wars are such big events, alot of things from the divergence of the 50's could have stopped the reasons for the wars. Nevermind. The wars could have happened, only with different technology (lasers in Vietnam, perhaps?). Since Russia isn't mentioned as communist in the Fallout world, since China is the main foe in the Cold War instead of the Soviet Union, then Soviet did fall in 1991 and all that, it's all possible but there are very very very tricky questions and no one can know for sure, only the devs can decide, they could sit down a long while and take up a lot of things between 1959 to 2011 and say if they did happend or not, and what happened instead.
But then again "details are pointless and trivial"... what matters now is the life in post-apocalyptia, 200+ years later. No one would even know about WW2