FRANCE: Weather or Not

It was the wettest June in Paris’ memory. “Summer already?” grumped the Communist L’Humanité. “And what about spring? A day without sunshine, or a meal without wine, that’s bad enough—but a year without spring, that’s indeed a hard blow. And all this is again the fault of the Americans. Not only do they occupy our land . . . but they shut off our sunshine!” The Communist journal then expounded a thoroughly unlikely theory that France’s bad weather was the direct result of U.S. atomic experiments on faraway Eniwetok Atoll. “Thus,” it cried, “while we wait to receive the atom bomb they are preparing … the American experiments at Eniwetok are permitting us to taste already those thunderous storms which are devastating our crops and raising even higher the market price of cherries and salads.”

In riposte, Columnist Georges Ravon of the conservative Le Figaro raised his brows and drily observed: “It is very curious . . . that the American warmongers’ bombs should be the only ones that react on our umbrellas. The peacemongers of the Little Father of the Peoples can experiment with their atomic weapons without L’Humanité noticing the slightest disturbance in our sky.”