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It could be argued that TLAM strikes have to be carried out from as close as possible to minimize the chance of detection and interception. Considering warships are constantly patrolling the waters, if you were to fire cruise missiles from hundreds of miles away, you'd give the enemy ample time to put vessels in the warheads' path and easily shoot them all down.
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The odds of a TLAM strike being picked up from a distance would be minimal. That's the point of cruise missiles. They have standoff, and are very hard to detect. Yes there is always a risk of having them overfly some random surface unit that can engage them, but it's minimal. Why did we spend all the time and resources to develop them to have 1,000+ nm ranges if we're going to launch them from less then 15 miles off shore?
As far as interception goes, a TLAM flies at approximately 550 mph (478 knots). Lets say the soviets have something that can do 50 knots and knock down a TLAM handy. Using the longest launch range I can find (1,550 miles) to give the longest time to move to the interception point, said surface craft would have to be within 150 nautical miles (plus whatever the weapon engagement envelope would be) of the flight path at the moment of launch. I'll be generous and say 200 nautical miles. That's assuming they can take off at flank speed the second the missile breaks the water. Honestly the risk of a surface unit being in range to intercept (other then by blind luck), is really only an issue as you get close to the target of the strike. Where air cover, ground based defenses, etc are all in place already.
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You already have considerably less than 100% accuracy being around the corner. Imagine if the Soviets had something like an hour to make sure that figure is zero.
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The accuracy of the attack has nothing to do with range. You actually want the missile to have a couple of land legs to get the navigation straightened out and the most accurate. At the time frame of CW the navigation would have been done most likely with terrain matching (I don't believe the GPS guidance would have been in place yet), and water makes for a poor piece of terrain to compare against. So unless the soviets can radically reshape the landscape (which theoretically you could do with atomic munitions for an important enough target), they can't do anything to decrease missile accuracy. The worst quoted CEP I can find for the TLAM is 80m for the TLAM-N (nuclear), and on average the block II models are listed as having a CEP of 10m.
I'm not crazy about the TLAM mission currently, but if it was base on simply firing off the TLAM's and getting out alive I'd be okay with it. Having the success or failure of the strike be on the player though (since we can't set ingress routes, pick target points, etc) I think is a little punishing.
-Jenrick