English votes on English issues? .

[joe-90]

Silly? It's bloody obvious man. Follow that sub Capn.

 

[JBR]

The UK has but one Trident armed sub at sea at any one time. The Ruskies will know exactly where it is and could obliterate it with impunity whenever it suited them.

You're partially correct. The UK normally has one Trident submarine at sea at any one time. The other three are being re-fitted, maintained, re-armed and re-supplied, etc.

I presume that you mean at least one Russian hunter-killer submarine is stationed near the Clyde ready to follow whenever a Trident submarine leaves port, which may very well be true. What is in our favour is that British submarines are probably the quietest in the world, quite probably more so even than the Americans and certainly much quieter than the Russians.
When a Trident submarine leaves port our own sensors, either in submarines, ships or on the sea bed, listen out for Russian submarines, monitoring their movement and location and probably also creating masking noise to confuse their sensors and prevent their following the Trident submarines.
Further along their patrol areas, our Trident submarines are able to detect Russian submarines at greater distances than they can detect ours, which gives them the advantage of changing course to avoid the threat.

I am probably over-simplifying and there are no doubt other means which are used to achieve the same thing: keeping the location of our submarines a secret.

 

[AronSearle]

JBR you should read up about the cheap Chinese diesel sub that managed to pop up amongst a fleet of US ships.

Even without fancy anti detection tech subs are bloody hard to spot.

 

[mark vincent]

Nationalism of any kind whether Welsh, Scottish or English will only cause more problems, Nationalism destroyed Ireland, Germany , Italy , Spain ect. it only leads to tears in the end.

I'm afraid I don't understand that. Ireland gained its independence from the UK in, I think, 1922, but from whom did Germany, Italy and Spain gain their independence?
In fact, if I remember my history correctly, both Germany and Italy became countries due to the union of a previous collection of smaller principalities, duchies, etc in the 19th century.

I was thinking more of Ulster, 30 year terrorist campaign by extreme nationalists left 3,500 people dead and caused billions of pounds worth the damage.

Ah, I understand that and I agree that 'the troubles' have done nothing to benefit the IRA; just caused misery for many people on both sides.

But how did nationalism destroy Germany, Italy and Spain?

Mussolini and Hitlers regimes could hardly be described as the success stories of the 20th century.

 

[mark vincent]

Since there's a long long list of countries which don't have nukes and which they also haven't attacked, that isn't 'evidence' of a nuclear deterrent working.

There can be other reasons for lack of Russian expansion through Europe in the 50s/60s - could it not be e.g. lack of money to support a war industry (since most of their trade at the time was with other Soviet-bloc nations which also lacked Western-level economies), plus with the Soviet Union sometimes struggling to feed itself anyway how would it have expected to fare if the majority of it's agricultural workers were conscripted and diverted into a fighting force? And how would it being an effective deterrent stack up against the Cuba crisis when the U.S. nuclear weapons made conflict more likely not less so since without the U.S. nukes there'd have been no reason for Cuba to be armed and it'd have in all likelihood been left as a small nation posing no threat to a large one, and the large one pretty much ignoring it as a consequence, so leaving each of them to go about their business.
To get back to the point, I don't see what having Trident is saving us from since disasters aren't befalling those countries which don't have it. If anything we have more conflict than most of them. And I see the 'fire insurance' analogy you made, but who does without other things to buy the most expensive insurance available, when others visibly do OK with a cheaper insurance? I agree with where you say the savings would be spent tho - the MPs would see a gain for themselves in it!

Could be the reason Russia didn't expand any further was because they did not want to, could be that they occupied the eastern states on their borders was for security reasons as some of these states had joined Hitlers invasion of Russia.
Russia lost 25million of its citizens to invaders from the west so they probably came to the conclusion that it is better to be safe than sorry, which why they are now reasserting themselves in the face of Nato expansion.

 

[JBR]

JBR you should read up about the cheap Chinese diesel sub that managed to pop up amongst a fleet of US ships.

Even without fancy anti detection tech subs are bloody hard to spot.

Ah, but they were American!

 

[JBR]

Mussolini and Hitlers regimes could hardly be described as the success stories of the 20th century.

But I thought we were talking about 'nationalism' in respect of independence, as with Wee Mrs Krankie and the SNP.

 

[JBR]

Since there's a long long list of countries which don't have nukes and which they also haven't attacked, that isn't 'evidence' of a nuclear deterrent working.

There can be other reasons for lack of Russian expansion through Europe in the 50s/60s - could it not be e.g. lack of money to support a war industry (since most of their trade at the time was with other Soviet-bloc nations which also lacked Western-level economies), plus with the Soviet Union sometimes struggling to feed itself anyway how would it have expected to fare if the majority of it's agricultural workers were conscripted and diverted into a fighting force? And how would it being an effective deterrent stack up against the Cuba crisis when the U.S. nuclear weapons made conflict more likely not less so since without the U.S. nukes there'd have been no reason for Cuba to be armed and it'd have in all likelihood been left as a small nation posing no threat to a large one, and the large one pretty much ignoring it as a consequence, so leaving each of them to go about their business.
To get back to the point, I don't see what having Trident is saving us from since disasters aren't befalling those countries which don't have it. If anything we have more conflict than most of them. And I see the 'fire insurance' analogy you made, but who does without other things to buy the most expensive insurance available, when others visibly do OK with a cheaper insurance? I agree with where you say the savings would be spent tho - the MPs would see a gain for themselves in it!

Could be the reason Russia didn't expand any further was because they did not want to, could be that they occupied the eastern states on their borders was for security reasons as some of these states had joined Hitlers invasion of Russia.
Russia lost 25million of its citizens to invaders from the west so they probably came to the conclusion that it is better to be safe than sorry, which why they are now reasserting themselves in the face of Nato expansion.

You're right. I can't blame the Russians for wanting to build buffer states for those very reasons. I'm sure there was distrust on both sides.