Agree with you totally on the nature of the exchange - and thats why having Guam survive, with its depots of torpedoes and other parts, is not only logical but also very likely.
I think people have been too hung up on how some of the modules treated the USN to basically say it was destroyed or almost wiped out. The picture that Last Submarine and Satellite Down painted of a wiped out USN just doesnt hold up. And you can see that from articles in Challenge Magazine that showed that there were still four operational destroyers left between Cape May and Norfolk (counting the Hancock) along with other ships - i.e. later authors tried to correct the totally wiped out impression of some of the modules.
Frankly Last Submarine is not realistic as to what kind of sub losses the US would have taken - especially to where they couldnt even get a full crew for supposedly the last submarine they had left. With all the ex USN submariners out there and how important this mission is (remember they flew one guy out from Colorado Springs for it to tend the reactor) they would have been able to find a full crew - heck the Omega fleet had to have a lot of stranded USN crewmen in it - certainly some of them would have served in submarines. Even old diesel sub crewmen would have been used.
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