The Bombs Never Fall On Washington, And That Has Always Been Europe’s Problem. Europe Often Claims It Is Finally Awake And That The War In Ukraine Has Clarified The Stakes Of This Century.
The deeper lesson is older and harder: the continent is positioned, not protected. The logic that shaped NATO’s nuclear scripts—from early exercises that mapped firestorms onto German soil to the WINTEX-CIMEX drills of the 1980s—has returned, updated and layered beneath the language of values. Europe now faces a war it did not choose, under a doctrine it did not write, inside a strategic architecture that has long treated it as expendable terrain for other powers.
From the Cold War to the war in Ukraine, the strategic equation has stayed the same: Europe is not what the United States protects. Europe is where the United States protects itself.
This remains the truth buried beneath decades of alliance rhetoric, moral vocabulary and political illusion—a truth European governments have avoided naming because doing so would unravel the foundations of their security identity.
Ukraine did not create this logic. It exposed it. For all the talk of shared values and mutual defense, the geographic reality has not changed. Europe absorbs the risk so the United States can wield the power.
This structure has defined the transatlantic relationship for seven decades, a design etched into nuclear planning documents of the 1950s and refined through the late 1980s in the WINTEX-CIMEX exercises.
Europe remembers little of these records. The United States remembers everything. The archives tell a story Europeans no longer tell themselves.
WINTEX-CIMEX, a series of classified NATO war games conducted through the Cold War, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, was not a minor planning activity. Declassified segments released through the Bundesarchive and German historical museum show it served as the operating script for a potential war with the Soviet Union. In every scenario, the pattern was consistent:
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The first American nuclear warheads struck European soil.
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The battlefield was Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Belgium. The expectation was mass European casualties, destroyed cities and radioactive terrain. The United States remained geographically insulated—committed politically, not territorially.
Carte Blanche, a 1955 NATO exercise, simulated hundreds of nuclear detonations over Germany, as shown in declassified assessments. WINTEX-CIMEX in 1983 reproduced the same logic with more advanced tools.
Across three decades, the message stayed the same: Europe remained the expendable theater of the American regime’s strategy—a shield, not a partner; a buffer, not a beneficiary.
In 1989, during WINTEX-CIMEX, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl withdrew his country from the exercise after seeing that NATO’s nuclear script still envisioned detonating atomic weapons on German soil. The incident, later noted in foreign policy retrospectives, underscored that even forty years after Carte Blanche, Europe was still treated as the sacrificial zone of the American regime’s strategy.
One question Europeans rarely ask is what replaced Carte Blanche and WINTEX-CIMEX. Those major strategic exercises did not end because Europe became inviolable. They ended because NATO shifted to planning regimes that are now classified, digitized, and embedded in a far more complex—and far less publicly understood—nuclear posture.
The alliance no longer releases nuclear-use maps for journalists to analyze. It no longer discloses how many European cities would be sacrificed to halt an advance. The logic did not disappear; it simply moved out of public view.
Current NATO exercises—framed as deterrence, readiness, or resilience—now operate behind layers of restricted access, encrypted simulation, and multinational secrecy. The public sees the choreography: jets refueling in formation, armored columns crossing borders, command centers lit by screens. What the public does not see is the escalation ladder built into these rehearsals. And if past planning documents teach anything, it is the first rungs still stand on European soil.
The geography has not changed. The alliance structure has not changed. The underlying assumption—that Europe absorbs nuclear risk so the United States does not have to—has not changed.
If anything, today’s silence is more disturbing than the Cold War’s limited transparency. Then, Europe could at least read the plans that condemned it. Today, it is asked to trust those plans no longer exist simply because they are no longer shown.
Yet every classified rehearsal, every tabletop escalation scenario, and every closed-door nuclear consultation echoes the same uncomfortable premise that guided Carte Blanche and WINTEX-CIMEX: Europe remains the battlefield of last resort, and Washington is again preparing for a war it does not intend to fight on its own soil.
Europe was never the protected. Europe was always the protection. The question now is whether Europe will continue confusing the two—or finally confront the cost of failing to understand the real world.
Hidden History -- In The Making 