Sunshine Boys

Recent victories in the War on Terror and the new détente with Cuba evidently mean that some clandestine servants of the World Cop by the Grace of God have a little too much time on their hands. Now that Castro's beard no longer requires the Agent Orange treatment, the CIA has turned its attention to artificial weather. A recent report on climate change was partly funded by America's waterboarding community, and a New Jersey academic claims that a couple of spooks turned up three years ago and questioned him ever so subtly about the possibility of induced meteorological chastisement. Notwithstanding the agency's contribution, the report's conclusions were unfortunately somewhat anchored in the real world, where prevention is likely to be more effective than CIA-sponsored techno-miraculosities. The use of weather as a weapon has been prohibited by international treaty since 1978, once the Americans had tried it in Vietnam and presumably found it too uneconomical to serve as an instrument of general democratisation.