A pledge from Brown can be taken seriously. He is Blair's heir, the man the still-powerful labor unions and left wing of the party see as their candidate after almost a decade of Blairite centrism. When Blair steps down, probably next year after a full decade in office, Brown will take over as prime minister. There is no other remotely credible Labor leader in sight.

And yet Brown last week, in his Mansion House speech to British industrial and financial leaders in the heart of the City of London, made the wholly unnecessary pledge to "retain our independent nuclear deterrent."

The current Trident system of submarine-launched missiles will last until it starts needing replacement in the early 2020s, and a decision on that replacement is to be made within the next four years, within the Blair-Brown era. And we now know what that decision will be.

This is not what the left likes to hear. Their view of British security has traditionally been to reason with potential enemies while apologizing for the British Empire in the past, complaining about American imperialism in the present and singing "We Shall Overcome" until the lion lies down with the lamb and all is sweetness and light.

This has not worked in the past and is unlikely to work in the future. Until Blair and Brown hauled the Labor Party platform back into the electable center in the mid-1990s, Labor candidates for Parliament back in the 1980s had to fight election campaigns on the solemn pledge to get rid of the British nuclear deterrent.

Since the Cold War was still under way, this did not strike most British voters as a terribly sensible idea. But Labor candidates were stuck with it, and Blair and Brown went through the sobering experience of campaigning on this promise and losing election after election.

But times have changed. The Cold War is over. The American allies are sadly much less popular than they used to be. And the price tag for replacing the current deterrent of almost 200 warheads deployed on four Trident missile submarines will be somewhere between $30 and $60 billion, with a further running cost of some $3 billion a year, all spread over a 30-year life span.

This is in fact not a great deal of money for a British economy that produces close to $2,000 billion a year. But it sounds like a huge sum, and allows unscrupulous political rivals to bleat on the need to spend the money on hospitals and other deserving causes.

Indeed, the predictable opponents of renewing Britain's nuclear deterrent have been saying little else. The giant Unison trade union has demanded the money be spent on pensions and pay raises for nurses and other public employees.

The Liberal Democrats demanded a vote in Parliament, charging that "Brown's posturing on Trident is smothering the national debate that this government promised to the British people."

The interesting new argument is coming from the anti-nuclear environmental movement. As Dominick Jenkins of Greenpeace put it: "Is Brown really prepared for the global cost to be the destruction of international treaties and the kick-starting of a new nuclear arms race?

"If Brown wants to take difficult long-term decisions and protect future generations then he should listen to the words of the people that are tasked with controlling WMD globally -- like Hans Blix and Kofi Annan -- who are urging nuclear weapons states not to build new nuclear bombs."

Underlying the current dramas over the nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran, and the way that India and Pakistan became nuclear powers, is the fundamental hypocrisy of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

It is based on a 40-year-old deal, under which nuclear wannabes agree to restrain themselves and the nuclear powers agree to move honestly toward nuclear disarmament. And they evidently have not done so, even though the total number of nuclear warheads has fallen from the 1982 peak of some 70,000 to around 27,000 today -- still more than enough to destroy civilization.

"The core of the impasse (at the NPT) lies in the fact that the contract between the nuclear-weapon states and the rest of the international community, which is the basis of the NPT, has been called into question," United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the Conference on Disarmament in New York last week.

"These facts have engendered a self-defeating debate between those who insist on disarmament before further non-proliferation measures, and those who argue the opposite, while both are essential."

The would-be disarmers, like Hans Blix and Annan, would be delighted if one of the original five nuclear powers, such as Britain, agreed to give them up.

Gordon Brown's wholly gratuitous defense of Britain's nukes should be seen as a pre-emptive strike against them, and against the Greenpeace plan "to spend the $40 billion from the Trident replacement budget like tackling climate change and developing secure alternatives to Middle East oil."

The fact is that Brown, who controls the government purse strings, has virtually doubled the sums for the Atomic Weaponry Establishment at Aldermaston, Britain's nuke factory, over the past two years, from just under $500 million a year to almost $900 million.

A new Orion laser system, designed to recreate the temperatures inside the sun or a nuclear explosion, has been built. Hundreds of new nuclear scientists are being hired. Under Blair or Brown, the British are staying in the nuclear business, whether their left wing likes it or not.

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