US and UK to now furnish Australia with nuclear submarines.

effing Pirates..you must be desperate 😂

By the same token, why aren't Taiwanese aboriginal languages spoken there? Or Dutch and Spanish, as well as Japanese? If language is the measure of Nationality? Well that's Ireland fúcked then isn't it?

As for the Japanese claim to Taiwan, as early as the 16th century the Japanese laid claim and the 1895 treaty of Shimonoseki ceded Taiwan to Japan in perpetuity. The defeat of Japan in WW2 led to administration of Taiwan being ceded to the Republic of China. Japan fully renounced sovereignty via the San Francisco treaty in 1951 and formalised ceding of Taiwan and Penghu Islands to the Republic of China via the treaty of Taipei in 1952.

At no point has Taiwan been part of modern China, much less the PRC.

The stealth subs are an interesting concept. Like your country could be nuked but you stealth subs could stay out there for years, great deterrent.

EDIT: Food and water is the problem I guess

The reactors on Nuclear subs output over 200 MW, so they have no lack of fresh water as it can be distilled from seawater by electrolysis. I can think of several ways for a sub to nab some fish.

I find if you want some balance in the news from the US then watching channels in equal parts of CNN and fox and a dose of RT does the trick.

CNN will ignore anything Biden does wrong, and keep talking about Trumps failings, FOX will tell you everything Biden is doing is wrong and RT will subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) point out what a kip America is.

So those this mean there are a few french submarines now looking for new homes?

Yep, like those life saving vaccines that were blocked from being sent to Papua New Guinea that Australia ordered for them.

Going cheap with a promo code

The Australian media coverage makes interesting reading.

Commentators characterise Scott Morisson as a flim flam man, a shallow operator lacking any strategy for this subject area and really for the Country as a whole. Former Government figures and trade experts are aghast that he has done this and possible imperiled a EU/Aus trade deal worth 500 billion dollars, which seeing how incandescent Macron is, is not beyond the bounds of possibility.

Long way to go in this yet.

I would disagree. Even Labour support this deal so it has cross-party support and in the main, both sets of media (News Corp/Fairfax) are supportive of this deal as a whole. Again, what's the alternative? Stick with diesel subs from the French? Some other deal, with who?

I cannot see a situation where this deal doesn't progress. As I mentioned, only once before in the US military history did they agree to share their secrets in Nuclear powered subs, which is one of the crown jewels of the US Military, that was with the UK back in the 1950s. I cannot see any situation that Australia turns that opportunity down.

The French will get over it and they don't hold sway over the EU either. Forget their dramatics.

The French, don't hold sway over the EU?

Riiiiight.

The soviets should never have trusted their top secret caterpillar drive sub to a Scotsman to captain.

Compensation will depend on the terms of the contract. The French seem to have been stuffing Australia around by prioritising work on their own subs rather than doing the work on the Australian ones. The program is years behind schedule and way over budget. 5 years since the contract signing and they haven't welded two pieces of steel together yet.

There is a bit of a history of European sub companies taking the piss with Australia. When the Collins boats were being built, the first bits were done by the designers Kokums in their Swedish ship yards. Some of the deep welds were found to be defective and had to be re-done by Australian welders. There were also significant shortcomings in the design that proved extremely costly to remedy and resulted in big delays and the final product did not perform as promised.

Australia has been having issues with non-performance by the French contractor as well as failure to deliver on things like subcontract work being given to French companies instead of Australian ones.

That said, I think Morrison is a national embarrasment. A third rate intellect and a political dog that should never have made it into the job. Howard even sacked him as tourism minister. His sucking up to the US is appalling, even by Australian standards. The whole thing has gotten far too expensive and I think they should buy subs off the shelf and stop pork barreling liberal seats. It's an absolute nonsense to talk about a necessity for independence and domestic capability on things that take a decade or more to build. They are happy to buy F35s off the shelf with no domestic capacity to make them.