The Puppet Master's Show

Welcome
Welcome to a new timeline! It's an idea I've been playing around with now for a while and more details about the TL will be on this page. Please feel free to get in touch about helping out, I would love other peoples input! This timeline is a bit abstract but I hope people get on board.

Synopsis
There are always big players in war and no war has seen bigger players than that of the Cold War. With the beacon of liberty and the western world staring down at the Giant of communism there was always a chance that the cold war would go hot. However, this isn’t simply a ‘Everybody drops the payload’ timeline, no. This timeline brings into play a third power. A cell that spans the globe and works from the shadows to destabilise the global equilibrium. They work in plain sight, traitors of their nations, to bring down the empires of man; rotting governments and spinning political power players like marionettes. The bombs will drop, but who will be pushing the buttons?

The Dark Beginnings
In the dwindling years of World War 2 there were pockets of agents of espionage still playing active roles in turning the tides of war on all fronts. These agents risked their lives behind enemy lines to destabilise the powers that be and win the war for their allies. This proved a success for the allies with the fall of Berlin and the defeat of the Axis powers in Europe. However this victory was quickly overshadowed by the new behemoths known as the Global Superpowers. The early murmuring of the cold war were already creeping through the cracks in allied command. This and the newly developed atomic bomb saw the distance between east and west tear into a great maw of paranoia. This is where our new players come into action. A group formed from scientists, spies, commanders and benefactors agree that the new state of the world was too fragile to continue as it was currently. The new group code-named POINTBLANK agreed that with the nuclear weapon in play the powers of the USA and USSR were too volatile and such began to conspire to tear the two great nations down. Espionage, terror attacks, secret armed coups in proxy states were all on the menu for our new global organisation. The group would take part in missions across the globe in the hopes of triggering total war between the two superpowers and bring about mutually assured destruction so that humanity could reform from the ashes a bright more prosperous civilisation.

Able Archer
There were many failures and successes in POINTBLANK's mission catalogue. There were uprisings, crises, close calls and Assassination attempts, some proved useful while others nearly destroyed the complex organisation. Finally the countless years of conspiring paid off when after many decades of inciting violence and paranoia in both camps, a few misinformed commanders of the soviet union were convinced that the military games of Able Archer '83 were a ruse and thus ordered for the first strikes of the nuclear strikes which would follow in a spectacular barrage that saw the world brought down to ashes. Many group members perished in the ensuing decimation but that did not matter as they had won, total nuclear destruction was achieved and the world was ready to be reshaped.

The Timeline
The timeline will be split into two sections
 * The first section will document the decades leading up to the able archer catastrophe.
 * The second will be the aftermath of total nuclear war.