AHC/WI: The Soviets win WWIII

Have the USSR win a Third World War. By win I mean have the Western powers be forced to come to the table and make peace with the USSR on their terms. Even if that means the Soviets do so over an irradiated world.

Bonus points: The War stays conventional. The NATO surrender is total and unconditional.
 
From what I've read, World War 3 in the late 40s seems to be the most plausible scenario in which the Soviets win World War 3.

Maybe postponed Barbarossa until 1942, leaving the Soviets more prepared and by the end of the war there in much better shape, maybe they've even taken most of Germany.

I can't say I'm an expert on this though
 
As I have been summoned!

Barring a pre-Cold War PoD or a borderline ASB scenario like, I don't know, the USSR suffers a "brokenback war" where it is the only one with the brokenback while the US is killed dead, an unconditional surrender is never going to happen (and even then that isn't so much an unconditional surrender as "the other guy's dead and we'll be joining them in five years or so" type of victory). A conditional surrender is best engineered by the eventuality of a political failing on the behalf of the Western Allies. That requires some kind of start to the conflict which fails to produce a rallying-around-the-flag event, either in a domestic sense (ie: the US public splits badly enough to torpedo the war effort and force a Soviet-favorable peace deal) or a international sense (ie: the NATO alliance splits badly enough to torpedo the war effort and force a Soviet-favorable peace deal). That's... a pretty difficult sort of conflict starter to find, especially for democratic nations where policy decision-making is relatively more diffuse then in a oligarchy or autocracy.
 
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I'm quite thinking about this for a separate TL of mine where both WWIII and IV break out in the 20th century, though the NATO side fumbles and loses WWIII (though the result isn't exactly "world communism ahoy!"), even after plenty of nukes are used; said TL involved the decreased need for nuclear weapons in context in case you ask so the damage isn't exactly like "Fallout/Threads/83 Doomsday-esque".

Anyway, I think you need most the NATO leadership to be somewhat incompetent at the start and continue to be so all the way or killed off and replaced by incompetents for a Soviet victory to happen (and the USSR able to damage the countries with nukes the most). The result would be much more akin to the Allies losing WWII in the early stages minus the US involved IMO.
 
The US invades Japan and is still reeling from doing so, Britain doesn’t recover and can’t affect anything in Europe, and China goes red sooner. The USSR has influence over all of Eurasia after booting the US out of Japan, and the US is forced to go back to the mainland sucking its thumb and wishing that damn A-bomb was worth a damn.
 
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