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Originally Posted by Raellus
The question is directed more towards 1e than other editions, but three out of Twilight 2000's four versions have fighting starting in Europe c.1996, so that's the temporal focus here.
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I'd call v.1 a good focus for this discussion, thanks for the clarification. Since v.1 does not assume an implosion of the USSR or an abolishment of socialist dictatorships in Central and Eastern Europe, but assumes the Cold War effectively to go on as it did in 1984 for another ten to twelve years, I think war would have to come from big power competition. Accidents could have happened far easier than planned action, since no-one was actually interested in war breaking out.
I always liked the premise of the novel Arc Light by Eric L. Harry. Essentially (quoting Wikipedia), "China and Russia clash in Siberia, and war brews between the United States and North Korea, a series of accidents and misunderstandings lead to a Russian nuclear strike against the United States. The U.S. retaliates against Russia, and World War III begins." This could easily happen in a timeline, where the USSR would still be around. In essence, the USSR/Russia and the USA need to be committed elsewhere, i. e. the Pacific, so that a crisis in Europe can overstretch ressources and overload capacities to acurately assess the situation. Errors and bad decisions have to be made.
I see this happen in Poland along the German border or at multiple points, i. e. Czechoslovakia and North (Eastern) Europe (Finland, Norway, Sweden) simultaneously. The threat arising during the situation must fit the bill though. Simply having a mid-level madman stage an attack or ships wrecking each other by accident, won't start a death spiral. High-level strategic assets of the two super-powers need to be endangered basically without warning or time to react. Otherwise one gets a Falklands scenario: Even a direct attack on the soil of a major NATO partner is not getting close to a nuclear war, if no superpower is involved and the attack happens in the (far) periphery of any epicenter of power.