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.