"When you have jets being flown up the English Channel, when you have submarines in the North Sea, it looks to me like it's warming up".
We went 60 miles west of Scilly and 60 miles west of Finistere to avoid submarines".
However, we have to be firm in protecting our core national interest … When you play chess you have a number of pieces on the board, but when talking about a country, you're talking about how many planes you have, how many submarines.
On the latter, the present plan is for four new submarines, which the military claims is necessary to maintain at least one submarine on patrol at all times.
Furious Labour officials insisted that Miliband had repeatedly said he would not strike any deal with the SNP on Trident and has committed his party irrevocably to a continuous at-sea deterrent involving four submarines, if that is the view of the Royal Navy.
He said: "It reads as a nightmare catalogue of serious safety breaches aboard and alongside these nuclear-armed submarines... Shortages of all types of crew on these submarines has been well-documented and the description of personnel in extremely stressful situations must be alarming given the huge responsibility some of these sailors are given.
The navy fired the odd Tomahawk cruise missile from its submarines at the north African state and seized a rare opportunity to fire the guns of its destroyers, but the army scarcely got a look in.
I was intrigued to hear that you had "a great time in sea with young daughters, uboating" at the weekend, but I suspect you weren't really impersonating second world war German submarines … more's the pity.
Today, Tuesday, a number of MPs are questioning why Britain needs to renew its fleet of Trident submarines equipped with intercontinental ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads.
And which party is for which number of submarines and what level of at-sea deterrent?
There is even a certain grim amusement to be had from the shamelessness of the Russian response: "Russian submarines, just like their surface fleet, carry out their duties on the oceans".
