"Stop and ask the question, why do we need nuclear subs?"

Issy, is the Pope a Catholic? What if there is a unprovoked attack on Tasmania by the Ethiopian Navy! What if we want to invade Swaziland by sea? How would Admiral Brassbottom do that unless we have a nuclear powered submarine or battleship or some such thing. These are troubling times, Tuvalu is fast becoming a super power with close ties to the belligerent nation of Niue. We must be ever vigilant and be prepared for a surprise attack at any moment. Recently there were provocative navel exercises involving nuclear powered canoes from both the Tuvalu and Niue navies only 10,000 km from Australia, just outside our territorial waters.

BTW, just the other day an Australian gun boat intercepted Ethiopians fishing in our territorial waters, they had an illegal canoe on our Zambezi River.

Yes Is Mise, we had great service from a Renault 12.

However more recently a company supplied Peugeot spent 3 of it's first 20 months at Zups, waiting for first a new front subframe, then a rear subframe, & finally pistons & a cylinder head, all to come from France, obviously by that original slow boat to china.

A replacement of the same make had the front subframe falling out again in 4 months, when we handed it back, & switched to a car allowance.

Hasbeen,
Not a good experience!!
The only other modern French car that I had much to do with was a Citroen Light 15 all the others were vintage cars, notably a Delarge.
Never managed to have a drive of a Bug though.

ttbn,
You mentioned French words ‘weaselling’’ into the English language, I presume you mean all the approximately 80,000 words that come directly from the French .

Let us not forget our measuring system which is, basically, a French system.

Still no response (Fr.) on what we owe to Braille and Pasteur.

Then there are the links to France through our Scottish heritage, from the Royal Scots Regiment of the French army to the Clan relationships with France, e.g. the MacLeod’s have a Clan MacLeod Society of France which caters for the Maclot, de Leon and Von Leod and other variants of the name.

Do you buy liquids in litres, travel kilometres, buy solids in grams?
Pay for kilowatts of electricity?

Better stick to some other system an avoid that French Connection.

Hi ttbn

Re your "but apparently the US has vessels in storage, six of which we should "buy or lease now""

Are these Virginia class SSN submarines?

Old Los Angeles SSNs, in the USN "boneyard", are no good as they suffer metal fatigue and have old reactors needing years to refuel. Subs over 35 years old (especially nuke subs) are dangerous for their crews and the general public.

AND it will take 10-15 years before the necessary 100s of Aussie submariners and maintainers can be trained up to safely operate nuke subs.

plantagenet says, "AND it will take 10-15 years before the necessary 100s of Aussie submariners and maintainers can be trained up to safely operate nuke subs."

As I commented above, this is what I question about this sub deal: the long time frame. In 15+ years, when these subs are finally delivered and we have staff trained, will they be state-of-the-art? I'm not an expert by any means on navel matters, but the current rate of of automation and AI improvements in the general commercial world is astounding. Mobile robots and other AI controlled autonomous machines are set to explode in numbers into our lives and I expect that will also be the case in the naval world. Indeed, some ports in Europe have been autonomous for quite a while and in Finland they already have an autonomous ferry. In fact the world's first fully autonomous cargo ship is currently going through trials and should be in operation in just a few months: http://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/25/world/yara-birkeland-norway-crewless-container-ship-spc-intl/index.html.

So I question whether in 20 years time whether the world's most advanced Navies will be anything at all like they are now. I will not be surprised at all if in twenty years time these subs are obsolete because some countries have gone down the path of replacing their human crewed vessels with an AI enabled autonomous navy.