Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis

Story

As President Ronald Reagan begins his second term in the White House, a little-known politician, Mikhail Gorbachev, becomes the leader of the Soviet Union after the death of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982 and two short-lived general secretaries of the Soviet Communist Party. Gorbachev is a reformer who wants to create a new era of peace and cooperation with the Western world. He uses terms such as "glasnost" and "perestroika" - modernist policies that involve restructuring the Soviet state and moving away from the old threats of the Cold War. Gorbachev's appointment immediately causes tensions; many of the Communist old guard, from generals to regional politicians, refuse to accept him, and chaos ensues. After a few days, the central government manages to bring the situation under control and the country returns to an uneasy truce with itself. But in some remote areas, often controlled by powerful men with their own agendas, the situation remains dangerously ambiguous and the Soviet government loses any real sense of power. One such area is the Malden archipelago: Everon, a peaceful independent republic; Malden itself, another independent state that is home to a major NATO strategic base; and Kolguyev, a Soviet outpost controlled by General Aleksei Guba - an old-school communist general who firmly believes in the harshest policies of the Cold War. Guba has made himself a feudal warlord and refuses to listen to orders from Moscow. The island has become a staging area for his well-equipped modern army, with which he tries to control the environment, and with the invasion of Everon he begins a dangerous adventure of his own kind. Worse, Guba controls an unknown number of nuclear weapons. The new Soviet government is unable to do anything about this flashpoint at the moment, and U.S. President Reagan meets with the new Soviet leader, Gorbachev. The expected outcome of the meeting is an agreement to send an international NATO force to the region to help keep the peace.