[Olefin]

I think that the limited exchange makes sense in many ways up to a point - but it breaks down big time at The Thanksgiving Day Massacre

that is hardly a limited exchange - basically the Soviets killed off a lot of the US population in that one series of attacks- more than enough for surviving generals with no civilian control to order an all out strike - especially after what the Soviets had already done to China

that many warheads hitting that many cities, with no US President in place and the military free to retaliate as much as they wished? Most likely the retaliatory strike would have been emptying the silos and subs - especially the subs if they went out of contact. Many would have had orders if they were out of contact for a specific time in wartime to fire the missiles on their own authority.

Especially since the EMP effects on the US were limited to those caused by nukes themselves going off - there was no large scale EMP attack on the US as there was in Warday that basically took out ever electronic device in the entire US

But even a limited strike can have a heck of an effect - read WarDay sometime if you want to see what they postulated that would have done to the US - basically the country broke up into individual states with almost no central government left - and that was with a lot of British and Japanese help - in the Twilight 2000 scenario, without that help, you could see it being a lot lot worse