It’s a dirty little secret of militaries that they prepare contingency plans for all sorts of hypothetical wars with foes and friends all the time. As I read somewhere, it helps to keep junior officers busy. And you never know from time to time they can actually come in useful. The US had Plan Orange, an outline for how to fight war with Japan. It sat on a shelf, from 1919 when Japan was still friendly, being periodically updated, until 1941 when Japan was anything but friendly.

One of the interesting ones on the shelf with it was War Plan Red, which described a war between the US and Britain which would have mainly been fought in Canada. It was kept live until 1935, and only declassified in 1974. There is a nice article on it from the Washington Post, Raiding the Ice Box in 2005. It even mentions one of our Fenian incursions to topple the British Empire by the Maple Leaf back door. As the article says,

after that, Americans stopped invading Canada and took up other hobbies, such as invading Mexico, Haiti, Nicaragua, Grenada and, of course, Iraq.

It is one of my guilty pleasures to read up on such whimsical what-ifs whenever they come to light. Oh what I wouldn’t give for a glimpse at the plans, which I am sure exist, but are hidden deep within the Pentagon, Whitehall, and the Kremlin, for the invasion of Ireland. Now they would be an interesting read.

In the mean time I will have to content myself with speculative, and unofficial gems like this one on a future war between the US and China.

Note: I wrote a short account of second world war invasion plans of Ireland by the British and Germans, back in 2005. It was taken from Robert Fisk’s excellent book on Ireland during the war. And it is properly researched and factually based unlike the silly article that appears on Wikipedia which is a mish mash of all the plans together.

And also at the time I mentioned the U35 making the cover of Life magazine. Will through the magic of Google books you can see that very issue today.

I thought a few baby photos were in order. Coz what will Rosemary say if in 10 years she looks back on this site and wonders why did Papa never talk about me? In case you are reading this Rosemary, it’s because I was enthralled with the crisis in North Korea. Okay?

My mother, Laura and Rosemary, all sitting on the landing in Vienna, the place I refer to as “the milking parlour”.

Laura and Rosemary, having a post feed moment.

Rosemary is a little young for true smiling and gurgling yet, but she is already experimenting with proto-smiles. Something that will in time evolve into a smile. This was one she gave me this morning after we came back from an early morning walk.

I hear stories of babies who are kept closeted up at home for weeks or months (or longer) after they are born. Not Rosemary. She is only 2 weeks old, but she has been out and around Vienna repeatedly. She has taken the tram and underground several times (children are free up until they are 6 here), and she has travelled by carrier and pram. Already she has been to 2 parks, the big shopping street (Mariahilferstrasse), a beer garden for dinner yesterday, and after this morning, a 40 minute walk around the 9th district which took in the Votivkirche. She has slept through most of these trips it has to be said. But she was wide awake and looking around her for half of the walk today.

I think she is going to be a smart little girl. But then I would say that wouldn’t I?

It’s just over 2 months since I got the keys of our apartment in Vienna. We are still unpacking, mainly because Austrian apartments are totally without storage. If you want wardrobes, cupboards etc you have to fit them yourself. And when you know you will only be here for a few years, why spend too much money? There will be a post later about the joys and complications of Austrian rentals compared to Irish ones.

I did have the movers back in yesterday. They were asked to haul away the considerable quantity of packing materials left after our move from Dublin.

As I said we hadn’t finished building up the pile, but there was so much there it was blocking the door and I think a family of pygmies had taken up residence inside it.

It’s all gone now though.

The Economist took a pitch at re-drawing the map of Europe. They based the new one on it being more logical and giving people friendlier neighbours who are similar.

Ireland stays where it is, but gets the three Baltic states for friends as:

These three countries should move to a new location somewhere near Ireland. Like the Emerald Isle, they have bitten the bullet of “internal devaluation”, regaining competitiveness by cutting wages and prices, rather than taking the easy option of depreciating the currency, or borrowing recklessly as Greece has. The Baltics would also be glad to be farther away from Russia and closer to America.

On the other side we would have Poland, which would get the security of a sea border for the first time. Our erstwhile neighbour Britain would be moved south as:

after its general election will have to confront its dire public finances, should move closer to the southern-European countries that find themselves in a similar position. It could be towed to a new position near the Azores.

This does seem like a perfidious plot by the Sassenach to get access to a better climate. Why does their fiscal situation get them a trip to the sun, and why do we get left stuck in the north Atlantic rain belts?

Well I have been a Daddy now for two and a half days. I don’t plan to turn this site into a shrine to the new arrival, she can create her own narcissistic facebook portal when she is a little older (in about 2 years I think based on kids these days). But I thought I would stick a few comments and random thoughts here about the practical parts of the experience Laura and I just went through.

First off I suppose I have to say a few words about the Austrian health care system. We had decided to go public in Ireland, and after checking things out in Austria we decided to go the same route here. Everything we have seen has left us comfortable with that choice. The biggest issue we had was in sorting out the bureaucracy of transferring entitlements between EU jurisdictions. Ironically by keeping her job and continuing to pay PRSI it made it more difficult for us to get Laura covered. For reference, it costs €5-7,000 for a private child birth here, about the same as at home.

When we sorted out that problem we were left with picking from one of 7 public maternity hospitals in Vienna, and a range of gynecologists. Once they got hold of her the Austrian medical system was very thorough. More thorough than in Ireland, but it has to be said they did make their mistakes as well. The hospital we picked was the Semmelweis Frauenklinik. It was recommended to me (yeah I picked it as Laura was still in Ireland) by some Austrian mothers I talked to. It’s about the same vintage as Holles street, but set in lovely wooded grounds in the suburbs. An added bonus was that you could get there by tram from our house. So yes, when Laura went into labour her miserly husband didn’t drive her, or take a taxi, but insisted we travel there by public transport.

We found the staff to be excellent – professional, competent and friendly. Laura and Rosemary are sharing a room with one other mother. I believe in Ireland there are 6 per ward. The only complaint Laura would have is the food won’t set you on fire. In the Austrian system new mothers typcially stay in hospital for 5 days. Compare that to Sweden where they recently got upset when a mother was sent home after 5 hours!

We seem to have been very unusual in not knowing the sex of the child. Everyone was surprised when we told them we didn’t know what Laura was carrying. Personally I had a preference for a boy or a girl over one of the other flavours. So I was happy.

Now that the child has arrived, a group of people keep telling me that my social life is over. I would like to point out that as someone who was taking up to 100 flights a year with work, for the last 6 years, I have no idea what a social life is anyway…

Because I was asked for pictures here is one. Of course both these ladies will kill me for posting up one that has then looking so tired after their busy night.

I also have a small video, where if you turn the sound up you can hear Rosemary’s mother admitting that here genes don’t see to have had much chance in contributing to RMJK’s appearance (a girl that looks like me? Oh dear!).

Every so often I haul out one of my old books for a re-read. At the moment if is one from 2002 Project Orion – The Atomic Space Ship 1957-1965. It is the story of how for 8 years a relatively small group of physicists and engineers looked at a space craft design that would have been as far ahead in capability from current spaceship designs, as a modern jet is from the Wright brothers. Today the space shuttle (now being retired with no clear replacement) has a fully loaded weight of about 109 tonnes. Back when Orion was being designed the size of capsules like Gemini and Mercury was 2 to 4 tonnes. At that time the Orion team envisaged their spaceship as being about 4000 tonnes! And it was a design that worked better as you made it bigger.

The principle was simple. Put a firework under a can and when it goes off the can flies up in the air. You just replace the can with your 4000 tonnes space craft, and you scale up the explosion underneath. Now what gives a big enough bang to move 4kT of ship? Do you see my evil grin?

Orion would have rode to orbit, and across the solar system on top of a chain of nuclear explosions. You would keep shooting small (about 1 kilo-tonne) nuclear devices behind the ship at the rate of about 1 per second. The blast would hit a pusher plate and the ship would get a kick equivalent to 2-4G. It turns out to be very efficient, far more efficient than chemical rockets. You could take that gigantic space craft to Mars or even Jupiter and Saturn in months. And as I said it scales very well.

They got as far as testing the system with conventional explosives. This is the video of their most successful test on November 14, 1959:

Six blasts with plastic explosive under a 1m scale model drove it to a height of 56m. From a feasibility point of view Orion there were no physics problems to stop it working, just engineering ones. mainly, how much ablation of the pusher plate would occur, and how would you shoot nukes through the plate at a rate of more than one a second?

The program died for a few reasons. First, it didn’t have political backers. NASA was committed to going to the moon, (a dead end project). And for that job chemical rockets were sufficient and a relatively known quantity. The military owned nuclear weapons, but they had no need for such a giant space craft, and no mandate for space exploration. The final nail was the atmospheric test ban treaty which stopped the project dead just as they would have begun testing the ablation problem with real nukes. That is the big issue we will probably never get over (each launch was likely to cause 1-10 deaths due to fallout) outside of some catastrophic need. But you can still watch the video and wonder about the Orion might have been.

It’s funny how you get all sorts of ideas about a person’s character from the most tenuous of observations of them. If you don’t have much to go on, you can grab some feature, habit or behaviour and decide “right, I guess they are like this then so”. Just yesterday Laura and I met a girl for the first time who we have decided is a) impatient, and b) changes her mind quickly. This on the basis that first she told us she was coming, and then she kept us waiting around for ages to arrive.

Now we were happy enough to see her when she did arrive, but only time will tell what her real personality is like. But that is part of the joy of having a daughter, getting to watch them grow up and see how they turn out (and doing your bit to shape that personality as well).

And just so you know, Rosemary Jane arrived last night (after a bit of a delay) at 12:37 weighing 3.48kg. Mother and baby are well, or as well as two tired, happy sleeping things could be, when I left them.

You have to wonder at the hypocrisy of the Irish government. Reading the Times this morning I see that they have rushed to side with the vigilantes, arsonists and scare mongers to ban head shops. These shops are so dangerous apparently that we got an exemption from the three month waiting period for banning substances from the EU. Brian Cowen said this was “because of the urgency of the issue”, and the government “not prepared to countenance this threat to the public health”.

In the same paper I see the crank Joe Coleman was at it again. Once again he had people believing he is communicating with god, and has them starring at the sun, some with sunglasses for protection, some not even bothering with that. The medical profession in Galway was reporting last year that this was leading to a increase in cases of solar retinopathy.

So would the government consider banning Joe Coleman because of his “threat to the public health”? Not a chance. Drugs are bad, mmm’kay. But religions nuts, no matter how harmful to people’s health get a free pass.

“Those decided to do this to themselves, it is their own free choice”. “They may not know the dangers they are in”.
Em, doesn’t the same excuses apply to the people visiting head shops?

“But the head shop owners are just exploiting their customers to make money”
Hmmm, and you don’t think Coleman is exploiting those poor fools who come to see him in Knock? Whether he is doing it deliberately or not is beside the point. The man is bogus. Perhaps the owners of head shops should argue they they are merely providing their customers with a religious experience?

This almost makes me nostalgic for my code wrangling days.

It gets a smile though.