A cloud of self-deception was general across Europe. A West German TV channel persuaded itself that the radioactive miasma would contaminate not the West but the Soviet Empire alone, as if to take revenge. An East German ministry spokesman referred to an American plot to wreck the people’s power stations. The French government appeared to believe that the cloud’s south-western edge matched the Franco-German border, which it had no authority to cross. The British authorities announced that there was no possible risk to the public, even as they set about closing 4,000 farms, forbidding the sale
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