Ultimately, a lot of what happened in the T2k backstory is unrealistic - very much so, to the point of Red Dawn/Invasion USA/Commando/any other 80s action war film cheesy badness unrealistic - but as has been mentioned a number of times before, GDW was not striving for realism, they were striving for exciting, interesting & fun gameplay.
A lot of what happens to the USA during the Twilight War comes down to GDW wanting to recreate the chaos of Europe so that the Players can have the same sort of adventures when their characters arrive back in the US.
If the USA was left in the kind of "almost untouched/more realistic" state that some people in past forums have wanted, the characters would return to the US, get reintegrated into the military and "realistically" end up doing garrison duty or worse, they'd be discharged from the military and have to find a civilian job - boring! Who the hell wants to play that for a game?
The authors stated that they wanted to make a game where the characters could go on adventures like the characters in AD&D do but instead of a fantasy medieval world, this game would be set in the 1980s/1990s of our world. In the "realistic" view, once the characters have finished in Europe and are returning to the USA, the game is over, time for the Players to put away their characters and look for another game... unless of course, the USA is in the same sort of mess as Europe, then you can continue the adventure anew.
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