Others have said it, I'll echo them - this is first-class work, Macragge.
Forgive some musings on the American situation. Most people have been talking about the National Guard as if they're angels of law and order, going to help knit the country together aganst secessionists. In fact, they're problem #1. Perhaps you're looking at the 2011 National Guard and think they're standup fellows, integrated with the Regular's command structure and often serving more grueling rotations in Iraq and Afghanistan than their Regular counterparts, because no one realized it was necessary to make State laws to protect them from indefinite overseas deployment. Yea, those guys aren't what we have in 1984. A senior NG officer in 84, by definition, was commissioned early-to-middle Vietnam, a fair number of them after Tet - when there was no chance of them being deployed in Vietnam. Simply getting a comission at that point meant you had friends in the Governor's office, liked having a gun, uniform and maybe a tank or jet, but didn't feel like seeing combat against an actual enemy. The Regulars are impressively apolitical. The NGs don't even pretend (some progress has been made since '75, since many of these problems have been identified, but it's been very slow going). You'll find many of them from state political dynasties. The guys willing to lay down their lives for the whole United States of America - mostly did, in the German Wasteland and the Korean Unholiness. The balance of military power in the USA has shifted from the President, wherever he may be, to the Governors. And they're likely to talk back to the Governors in a way that Regular Generals do not talk back to the President. Bad juju.
I was looking at the 1990 target list, and Vermont jumped out at me. No primary targets. No secondary targets. One tertiary target - the city of Burlington, which is not the state capital. Given the reliability of the Soviet part of the Exchange, I reckon 50-50 odds that Vermont got no nukes at all; it may be the most whole and functional of the States. With the horror that Massachussetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island are glass while New York, New Hampshire and Maine are crippled, Vermont is going to have a big refugee problem. I wonder how the Governor will handle things. As close as it is to New York, perhaps that's where our valiant Prospero crew met the Secretary.
Idaho and Wyoming are nearly as good, and Oregon and Oklahoma not too bad. Nevada will survive the Exchange (an on-target hit at the base isn't going to damage the Strip), but not the disruption to its water supply and the seething mass of hell coming over its western border. Just a different way to die, I suppose. The Mayors of Las Vegas and Cleveland could be interesting viewpoints too.
Thank you for your work.
EDIT: Oh, South Africa - yeah, it's gonna be that bad, including the unique concept of victory that involves nuking your own major city. Plan Orange 84 hasn't been written and accepted yet, and this is an Orange situation; the government has no concept of acceptable (white) losses yet, so it's going to throw everything it has at the "kaffir" uprising. Even if the nukes from Angola are retconned, that situation remains. It won't be enough, especially with Johannesburg gone. The refugees are, at least to my mind, probably all despicable...but the things they've seen happen as their nation collapses brings them to the mental state where that's almost normal and tame behavior.