Former Home Secretary, John Reid, has kept his powder dry since leaving the government but he is testing it right now.

The government doesn’t want to get the wrong side of him on its cuts in the Territorial Army training. Yesterday in the Commons the old bruiser signalled his unhappiness with uncharacteristic delicacy (column 26).

But the government got the message. The clock is ticking towards a three-line whipped vote tomorrow (Wednesday) at 7pm on a Conservative motion attacking the TA training cuts. read more

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The Prime Minister is about to announce plans to enhance the helicopter numbers in Afghanistan.

The Japanese may be signing cheques to upgrade some Nato helicopters and RAF Merlin helicopters are going to be adapted for dusty climes.

The mounting death toll has piled pressure on for an announcement. Pressure will now switch to personnel numbers.

The government had been digging in its heels about putting any extra forces into Afghanistan and sighed with relief when the newly elected US President Obama didn’t ask for more troops at the White House meeting in March.

There’s a 700 uplift specific for the election period and numbers are then meant to go down again. In fact, look at the Afghanistan strategy document published in April and it says: “force levels will return to an enduring maximum of 8,300 in 2010.”

That phrase, “enduring maximum” or cap may have to be revisited if the government’s forced to announce even higher troop numbers in the months to come.

UPDATE: The Prime Minister didn’t announce the Japanese money for German helicopter upgrades – that will come another day and may not be quite cooked.

But he did talk about the Merlins (perhaps six of them) and eight more Chinooks… it should put British helicopter numbers in theatre in Afghanistan, which are never given precisely, up from 20-something to 30-something.

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I’m taken by Stuart Bell’s response, and indeed the others’, to my submarines piece from yesterday, including the idea the two captains rose through their turrets to exchange insurance details.

Stuart closes the torpedo compartment on me – the one marked with a “Ban the Bomb” label. But in their haste to brush over this incident the MoD’s defence has been much the same: “Don’t wory old chap, a nuclear explosion would have been impossible.”

But it isn’t simply the matter of that particular danger. Surely it is the fact that this, our celebrated “ultimate defence”, has been reduced to the realms of farce. Indeed, if what the MoD has disclosed reveals even half the truth, it is pretty bad.

Why won’t they let us see what is our sub, paid for with our taxes? Telephoto lenses to the fore in Faslane. But even they have failed to reveal what is being repaired of the ship.

If the MoD has nothing to hide in this ridiculous incident, they should show all – and TODAY!

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We thought the collision of two satellites in outer space last week unlikely enough. Now we have the absurd spectacle of two submarines, one British, one French, so completely in their “Secret Squirreledness” that they’ve actually collided with each other.

So secret, indeed, was the collision that we’ve only heard about it nearly two weeks after the event. Each was nuclear powered and, more to the point, each was nuclear armed. Jolly funny.

Not so fast. There was, of course, no loss of life – but there well could have been. And it throws into sharp relief what Mr Obama has been telling us, that the availability and quantity of nuclear arms around the world remains a dangerous threat.

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