This campaign is set in a world which diverged from ours in the spring of 1985. At that time, Gorbachev was toppled from power by a coalition of party hard liners and the military, who worried that the general secretary's plans for put the revolution and their own power too much at risk.
Despite the removal of Gorbachev, the underlying crisis facing the Soviet Union remained: the decline of productivity, general public apathy, and the relative rise of Western economic and political power. Looking at the poor long term prognosis, the new Soviet leadership decided to use military force to destroy the West before its own relative military declined to impotence.
Early in August 1985, the forces of the Warsaw Pact attacked NATO and Western interests worldwide. This war started out on a strictly conventional basis. In Western Europe, the Soviets struck westward, airborne units landing on both banks of the Rhine in the Ruhr Valley, reinforced by a powerful armored thrust over the North German Plain. Simultaneously, a Soviet airborne division landed in Alaska as a diversion and to provide airbases in striking range of the U.S. west coast. The initial Soviet success was short lived as NATO forces mobilized and were reinforced from the U.S. and Canada. By the first part of October, the Warsaw Pact was unraveling as its forces reeled eastward from a massive military defeat. A panicky Soviet government ordered the use of limited tactical nuclear strikes against NATO logistical centers. NATO responded, and a brief, sporadic nuclear exchange resulted.
Only a small percentage of both side's nuclear stockpiles were used. Even so, a large percentage of the population of the world was killed in the exchange or its immediate aftermath. The collapse of infrastructure, health care, and social order, aggravated by the early onset of a winter worsened a declining population spiral. Harsh and early winters in 1986-87 and 1987-88 brought death and starvation to millions more. By 2005, the population of North America was less than 10% of that of 1985.
The campaign begins in April 2005.