Greensink.

WHAT AGITATES France about the Greenpeace affair is not the fate of the boat, the Rainbow Warrior, and its crew. Greenpeace passes itself off to the general public as a band of environmentalists who are just slightly more rambunctious than normal; a direct-action Audubon Society. But they are also bitterly anti-nuke: against nuclear power and particularly opposed to nuclear weapons. The French prize their deterrent. They were planning to test important weapons in the Pacific--perhaps the Hades, a new intermediate-range missile, designed for use against Soviet troop concentrations; perhaps the neutron bomb. Greenpeace intended to disrupt the tests. No French government, to the right of the Communists, would have permitted that to happen.

The sin of Mitterrand's underlings, in French eyes, was doing what was done so ineptly. The bombing produced a quite unintended corpse. Worse, the bombers were caught. Worse yet, they were caught by New Zealanders, who have behaved in a manner that is quite insupportable.

The scandal hits Mitterrand at a most inopportune moment. His economy, and his political fortunes, were depressed. He had recouped a measure of popularity by appointing as prime minister a flashy young technocrat, Laurent Fabius, a kind of French Gary Hart. This has now blown away like smoke. The Socialists head toward March's parliamentary elections with a disgraced leadership. Mitterrand, who stays in office until 1988, looks as if he will be a minority president. It could be he will be an ex-president before 1988.