Been thinking about this, Chernobyl is the divergent key

[raketenjagdpanzer]

Okay, so bear with me, I've had a few so I could be wrong but...

I think if you factor out the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in April of 1986, Gorbachev comes and goes and is muscled out by '91 or '92, maybe dies of a "cerebral hemorrhage" or has to go so fuckin' slow with perestroika and glasnost that by 1995 things have gone so far to shit in east asia that there's no WAY he can do the "openness" thing. Gotta keep that Soviet pride up!

And given that fact, the US can't just barge in to the ME and stop Saddam, but Saddam is already stopped by virtue of being a soft Soviet client state anyway; the Sovs use him as yet another ME wedge against the west, there IS NO ODS, so you've written that out...no worries there. Anyway Gorby passes into history and some other hard-ass (who led the rebels in '91 against Gorbachev and Yeltsin? make it him) comes to power and while the USSR is crumbling it's not collapsing. In the west as far as the Rand Group is concerned, the USSR is falling apart right on schedule (I've read some reports that the Rand people were fucking terrified in 1989 because they had no idea the wheels were just gonna come off like that in the Eastern Bloc - all thanks to one poor newsreader!) - BUT

Suddenly the crafty Chinee is breaking bad* in East Asia, heady with power and flooded with cash because they're powering the west's computer Renaissance, they get buck wild and bam, T2k 1.0 right there.

Now that typical and obvious Russian Chauvinism kicks in to high gear (seriously, go read the comments on any given YT thread regarding ex-USSR military gear, the poor ex-Young Pioneers defending that tin trash are almost laughably sad to watch when they post), and they sacrifice a few million along the Trans-Siberian...

All because Chernobyl doesn't go down. Because Gorbachev never has the chance to be "open" to the west. You just change one thing! An operators notebook for the RBMK-1000 reactor. Just a couple of words, and we've got Twilight:2000.

[Greylond]

I'm sure that Chernobyl had a part but what really brought down the USSR was the USA's strategy of encouraging them to spend more and more of their GNP on their military. That's really what the Reagan military buildup and SDI was all about. Reagan's military and science advisers recommended that course of action and that's what he decided to do. The USSR's economy basically collapsed and the government HAD to westernize their economy.

[StainlessSteelCynic]

Chernobyl was a deciding factor. Gorbachev admitted that the event demanded a level of openness with the West that the Soviets would not normally provide. The necessity to tell the world that it was a nuclear catastrophe (and that they needed help to manage it) and not something that could be interpreted as military action was uppermost in his mind.
The US policy of having the USSR bankrupt itself was definitely working but it still would have taken many more years and probably decades.

[Greylond]

Yea, I agreed that it was a part, but I don't think it was the "Divergent Key." Definitely a factor, but I don't think there was any true single event that caused it.

[raketenjagdpanzer]

Well being clear-headed today and thinking about it, I still stand behind my theory, mostly.

[StainlessSteelCynic]

Saw a relevant quote on the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. PC game wiki site (the page in question dealing with the first of the two English language novels so far written).
The quote in question...
"...the USSR's Afghan war is largely forgotten in the West, nonetheless it was the other disaster that had led to the downfall of the Soviet empire. Just like Chernobyl, it scarred the bodies and souls of a whole generation..."


The first novel is titled 'Southern Comfort' and has a support webpage here
http://www.stalkersoutherncomfort.co...#!__main/about
The wiki page about the novel
http://stalker.wikia.com/wiki/S.T.A....uthern_Comfort

For those interested in buying the paperback or Kindle versions, Amazon US and Amazon UK both list copies but for the quickest search make sure you type S.T.A.L.K.E.R. otherwise you may get a whole lot of other books coming up that may make your mother worry about you