Eighty years ago this week mass destruction morphs into mass distraction

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Designer Louis Reard presented a two piece swimsuit to the world at the Piscine Molitor in Paris. No established catwalk model would take the risk of appearing in such a revealing item and it was worn by a nude dancer from the Casino de Paris, Micheline Bernardini. A competing designer had launched a two-piece swimsuit a few weeks before under the name "Atome" with the copyline, "the world's smallest swimsuit." Reard baptised his creation the bikini after the site of the atom bomb test a few days before and promoted it with the line "smaller than the smallest swimsuit." The name stuck and Bikini Atoll, now uninhabitable and unproductive because of radiation contamination, is largely forgotten.

 The Hungarian economy had been ravaged by severe inflation since the end of the war and this developed into hyper-inflation far worse than experienced in Weimar Germany in 1923. At its worst prices were doubling in about fifteen hours. A banknote of 100 quintillion  (ten to power twenty) was issued, the highest denomination ever.

As the conference to set a formal peace treaty with Germany got under way the Soviet Union once again flexed its muscles. Molotov, the foreign minister, criticised the draft treaty which had been proposed and demanded $10bn in reparations which might be paid out of ongoing German output. The Potsdam agreement had foreseen only existing equipment being handed over in reparation. He also wanted the period of full German disarmament to be extended to forty years from twenty-five. 


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