A time ago, which seems a lot longer than the few that it has been, I was working with the late
T.R. (rest in peace, my friend) to come up with an alternative timeline along the lines of what you're talking about
GDWFan. We used a lot of real world events, tweaked them ever so slightly the way they "could have" gone and ended up with a Twilight war that dealt with a bit more military build up than what occurred in regular Twilight.
Our main catalyst for initial combat was the real-world famine that hit North Korea back in the 90's. From there we used other things around the world...former Yugoslavian nations...Italy electing a borderline facist as a leader...stuff that seems really strange but was either true or was just a slight nudge away from being the truth.
In the end, we had a timeline that brought us to the nuclear armageddon that is in Twilight. Rather than trying to reinvent or twist the Twilight: 2000 history we just decided to make the game we were working on a "what if". A lot of work was done, but a lot still needed to be done.
