Part 2 of 2 Parts
Carte Blanch was primarily an air war carried out over six days. A total of about twenty-five hundred aircraft were allocated to both sides. The referees controlled the pace of the conflict. They informed the personnel of air bases when they were hit by a nuclear weapon. This included the distance from the base where the shell landed and the damage that it caused.
British Air Commodore Peter Wykeham-Barnes was the Chief of Staff of Allied Air Forces in Europe at the time. He briefed the press on the outcome of Carte Balance. It was concluded that tactical nuclear war would probably favor the aggressor. He said, “in an all-out atomic war, there would be no winners and no losers and little left to assess. Any similar conflict would be short and horrible.”
The details of Carte Blanche were leaked to Der Spiegel, a major West German newspaper. The leaked info said that targets in West Germany had been the most severely impacted of NATO nations with two hundred and sixty-eight of the three hundred and thirty nuclear weapons used in the conflict being detonated in West Germany.
The tally of such a war on West Germany indicated that there could be as many as one million seven hundred thousand killed and three million five hundred thousand wounded. This would kill more people in hours than strategic bombing killed in Germany in all of World War II.
These predictions shocked citizens of NATO countries, especially in West Germany as would be expected. The Carte Blanche exercise had a great influence in forming public attitudes towards nuclear weapons and the role they should play in defending Europe. Serious public opposition to the deployment and use of tactical nuclear weapons in West Germany rose.
Henry Kissinger was an academic at the time of Carte Blanch. He concluded that Carte Blanche had become a “a demonstration that the power of nuclear weapons inhibits their use unless there exists a doctrine which poses alternatives less stark than total devastation.”
Although the results of Carte Blanche seriously increased the concern over the use of tactical nuclear weapons in NATO nations, the overall consensus of military planners was that there was still a valid need for tactical nuclear weapons in Western Europe.
One effect that Carte Blanche did have was to compel NATO nations including West Germany to demand a greater say in the formulation of NATO’s nuclear strategy. This resulted in greater U.S. consultation with its NATO allies in the form of NATO’s Nuclear Planning Group.
The issue of tactical nuclear weapons is still hotly debated today. Russia has said that if it were involved in a land war in Europe and were losing to conventional NATO weapons, it would consider being the first to use tactical nukes. The U.S. is currently deploying a tactical nuclear gravity bomb with variable yield. The big concern about tactical nuclear weapons is that they make it more possible for military planners to consider their use on the assumption that escalation to a global nuclear conflict would be less likely. Let us hope that they are right.