That is the only way I have been able to make sense of the pre-war fashion.

Is that correct?

Yup. Retro-futuristic.

This is Fallout in general, not just Fallout 3. Although Fallout 3 took it to the extreme.

It also says this on like, the first page of the instruction manual.

Yes it is, I recognise the world of Fallout 3, from the science fiction books and comics that I used to read as a child.

I was born in 1953, there were still large numbers of 1950s comic books and so on in circulation during my early childhood.

Wait, what? there's a manual?!

The storyline is interesting. If you've ever read any predictions for the year 2000 from 1950's-60's era magazines or anything like that, Bethesda has put it in Fallout. People thought that we would have things like flying cars, rocket belts, instant food machines, and little tubes that come out of the walls and spray off everything in your house with water which drains into a hole in the floor. I think Bethesda wanted to stick with the 'anything is possible in the future' 1950's mentality, along with the fear of nuclear war. In the Fallout world, instead of developing the space program, they developed advanced weapons and robotics. It's kind of a 'what if' scenario, and I think Bethesda hit the nail on the head with the whole Fallout series.

have you've been to the Museum of Technology? seems they developed space tech just fine.
Fallout just replaced fossil fuel use in the 1950's with nuclear power. I mean geez.. the robots
use vacuum tubes with a nuclear power source! nice. otherwise, mostly everything about
Fallout is ala 1950's.

Fallout 3's Pre-War era always reminded me of that show The Jetsons.

I think Bethesda did a pretty good job capturing the feel of the 1950's World of Tomorrow. It makes the game's world a lot more unique from apocalyptic films such as The Terminator or George Romero's Living Dead films, which always seem to take place in the present time. Fallout 3's America is set in a kind of alternative universe which kind of gives you a distorted view of our reality.