My first weblog

Does anyone would like to blog with me ?

I will have to open a new blog for several reasons :
- my blog engine, Dotclear, is spammed with commercial comments.
- I would like the new blog to be 100 % in English (user and reader interface), powered by Wordpress.
- most important reason : time. I don't have enough time to post everyday serious notes as long as I would like
(though I spend time everyday reading RSS feeds and trying to imagine interesting subjects to blog about from them).

If you are interested and :
- you would like to blog about International Relations, intelligence, defence industry, proliferation or any subject related
(civilian aircrafts, energy, politics... etc etc) from open sources only;
- you can write in English and have time to blog (around 15 minutes or more each day you want to blog but you could blog just twice a week. This, just from your computer);

- you don't have to be familiar neither with blogging in general nor Wordpress in particular.
I will install the new blog on a new domain name chosen in concert. Then I could explain a bit of HTML to start blogging;
- it's free : you won't pay and won't be paid. There is no obligation at all except writing pieces of text from time to time.
The worst thing that could happen to you is being read.

Just let me know by email. Thanks.

The new website will open from the end of February. You have time to think about it.

UPDATE :
Of course, if I open a new blog, it will be 100 % independant, managed by motivated amateurs only and not related to the institution where I am doing an internship.
I will continue to keep the 2 spheres separated.

I already advised a conference on Game Theory. Here is something else, as sharp towards think tanks as the other one.

Excellent article via phnk on econoclaste blog about the most important event of the XXth century :
"the one that did not happen" (ie a nuclear war, despite Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

It was developped in Thomas C. Schelling's Nobel Prize Lecture : An Astonishing Sixty Years [viewable online, real video format]

« IRANIAN USE OF NUCLEAR WEAPON ON ISRAEL WOULD BE 'SUICIDE BOMB' » Interview by Thomas C. Schelling
(more perceptive than econoclaste's note, imho)

Following the previous note other interesting pieces about, something I am very interested in, missiles and missile defense :

Jacques Chirac :

« Des essais de missiles balistiques, dont la portée ne cesse d'augmenter, se multiplient partout dans le monde. C'est ce constat qui a conduit le Conseil de Sécurité des Nations Unies à reconnaître que la prolifération des armes de destruction massive, et de leurs vecteurs associés , constituait une menace réelle pour la paix et pour la sécurité internationale. »
[...]
« De même, nul ne peut prétendre qu'une défense anti-missiles suffit à contrer la menace représentée par des missiles balistiques. Aucun système défensif, aussi sophistiqué soit-il, ne peut être efficace à 100%. Nous n'aurons jamais la garantie qu'il ne pourra être contourné. Fonder toute notre défense sur cette unique capacité inviterait, en réalité, nos adversaires à trouver d'autres moyens pour mettre en œuvre leurs armes nucléaires, chimiques ou bactériologiques. Un tel outil ne peut donc être considéré comme un substitut de la dissuasion. Mais il peut la compléter en diminuant nos vulnérabilités. C'est pourquoi la France s'est résolument engagée dans une réflexion commune, au sein de l'Alliance atlantique, et développe son propre programme d'autoprotection des forces déployées. »

Official statement of the French Republic President, Jacques Chirac, at Brest, operational base of Force Océanique Stratégique
(French nuclear submarines forces):

« les dirigeants d'Etats qui auraient recours à des moyens terroristes contre nous, tout comme ceux qui envisageraient d'utiliser, d'une manière ou d'une autre, des armes de destruction massive, doivent comprendre qu'ils s'exposent à une réponse ferme et adaptée de notre part. Et cette réponse peut être conventionnelle. Elle peut aussi être d'une autre nature ».

Suivez son regard...

Le texte complet du discours aux Forces Océanique et Aériennes Stratégiques (FOST) / integral speech [in french]

Newsagencies dispatches :
Jacques Chirac annonce une inflexion de la doctrine nucléaire

Jacques Chirac brandit la menace de frappes nucléaires ciblées

I strongly recommand a book I bought in the US and that I have read during my holidays :

ANDREW Christopher & MITROKHIN Vasili,
The Mitrokhin Archive vol. II : The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World, Basic Books, New York 2005.

It was released in 2005 but not much publicized in France, hence this note that I hope will draw attention. Volume I (*) was also worth reading but we learn more in Volume II's foreword by Christopher Andrew about the story of Vasili Mithokhin, a KGB defector that fled to Great-Britain in 1992. He died in 2004 and most of his biography can now be narrated (he was a KGB archivist during the Cold War and became a silent dissident to the communist regime).

However, his life is not the subject of the book. These 2 masterpieces are as objective and accurate as possible. Contrary to James-Bond style espionage pseudo-historical stories based on rumours and disinformation, these 2 are of academic quality thanks to the KGB archives brought to the West by Vasili Mitrokhin. But I won't tell more. You will only know who was a KGB agent and which movement or government was financed by the USSR if you read them.

(*) The Mitrokhin Archive vol. I : The KGB in Europe and the West, London, Penguin, 2000 (first published 1999).

__

All the photographs of New York are here.



(the serie has know ended, no photos any more, back to blogging as usual)

- Government buildings : pic 10 to 27
- International Organizations : pic 28 to 34
- other places of interest : pic 1 to 10 and 35 to 65



(just click on a picture to enlarge it)
If you want to see all the photographs at a glance, just follow this link.

[ advertisement for a fellow blogger : Album photo Inside DC ]

When in Washington, you have to visit the National Air and Space Museum. There are two locations :

- the Mall Building (on the Mall as its name indicates, just next to other Smithonian museums and galleries) with a rather small collection of aircrafts and spacecrafts but some good artifacts (including engines, rockets, uniforms, spacesuits, balloons, artwork, documents, manuscripts and photographs).

- the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Washington Dulles International Airport (see post I/IV below to see satellite image and photos of it).
There is displayed a collection of warbirds, if not the largest (Musée de l'Air et de l'Espace in Paris - Le Bourget and Imperial War Museum Duxford can compete) probably the best I have ever seen, even though other collections (Hendon RAF Museum near London, one museum in Moscow and others in the US that I don't know) might be as good as this one with more non-US aircrafts (there were only an old French WWI Caudron and some WWII Luftwaffe and Japanese fighters along with a British Hurricane.

More interestingly for my work and current job and quite unusually for a museum, Air-Air Missiles, Surface-Air Missiles, Cruise Missiles and Anti-Ballistic Missiles can be nearly touched.

Last but not least, spacecrafts are not forgotten (Gemini and Apollo capsule) and the real Entreprise space shuttle (the one that served for aerodynamic tests but never went to space and should have been called "Constitution" in memory of the USS Constitution)

35 pictures of missiles - 14 photos of aircrafts - 4 photos of satellites
(mainly of the JSF F-35)

(just follow the links or click on one of the photographs above to see them all)

To see more picture of the big and small objects in the Air & Space and the complete catalogue, have a look on the collection database

More pictures will return (next ones : Washington D.C.)

For those who might be interested and/or are fond of (civilian) planes, airports and spotting, stay here.
All the 57 pictures I took during my plane trip to Washington and return journey to Paris can be viewed on this page

(just follow the link or click on the photograph below)


I spotted also landscape, sunset and planes landing from a high tower at Dulles Airport. These photos are also online from picture 28 to picture 38.

More pictures will return (next ones : Air & Space Museum)