If you are ever driving up the M6 to Scotland on a dark night, and you see a convoy of three sinister-looking dark green trucks come loom ing up out of the mist ahead of you, be afraid. Be very afraid. You have just come face to face with part of the UK's stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. Each cargo truck carries a crate of warheads from Trident missiles, each capable of triggering a thermonuclear explosion ten times the size of Hiroshima. The warheads regularly make the journey down to the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Aldermaston to be spring-cleaned before going back up the M6 to the sub marine base at Faslane in Scotland, from where our plucky Royal Navy Trident subs - one aptly named HMS Vengeance - patrol the world's oceans, ready to deal out death to millions of innocent people at the casual flick of a switch.

Apologies. I should not have used the term "weapons of mass destruction". Our nukes are not WMDs; they are, in Gordon Brown's words, an "independent nuclear deterrent". WMDs are what other people have: people such as Saddam Hussein (oh - whoops) and the mad mullahs who rule Iran. Although each of the UK's four Trident submarines carries up to 48 warheads, and although each warhead would assuredly cause "mass destruction" in any city that it was dropped on, these are still not classified as "weapons of mass destruction". All the UK media seem to agree on this point, which is why the WMD phrase is never used in the same breath as any discussion on Trident. The hypo crisy is all the more blatant for being unspoken.

Concern about WMDs entered the popular lexicon during the build-up to the war in Iraq, and was imported from the United States - like the rest of Britain's foreign policy - by Tony Blair. Blair, whose recent open-mike embarrassment at the G8 simply confirms that he is more of an American ambassador to Westminster than a true British prime minister, used the term as the basis for his war propaganda. Three years on from that illegal invasion, Labour is now laying the groundwork for another illegal act - the updating of Britain's nuclear weapons capacity. The renewing of Trident would be illegal under Article VI of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which commits all five of the declared nuclear powers to "general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control".

So might a new generation of nuclear power stations - as proposed in the government's 11 July energy review - pose a proliferation risk, given that fissile material from civil nuclear reactors could end up in the new generation of Trident? After all, the UK's nuclear power programme was originally established in the 1950s to generate plutonium for weapons, and the state-owned nuclear fuels company BNFL still has a governing role in the running of the nuclear weapons programme at Aldermaston. Wouldn't this put us in the same international category as Iran? Might legions of white-suited weapons inspectors come swarming around Sizewell C one day in the future and seal the whole place off with blue-and-white UN gaffer tape? The International Atomic Energy Agency, which polices civil nuclear power programmes around the world, declined to rise to the bait when I phoned - though its spokesman made it quite clear that the IAEA will take a dim view of any new moves regarding Trident.

One dangerous Middle Eastern state - Israel - already possesses nuclear weapons. Its stockpile of perhaps 300 warheads makes it a bigger nuc lear power even than Britain. The international community hypocritically observes a "don't ask, don't tell" policy regarding Israel's stockpile: we don't ask, and the Israelis don't tell. Quite why Israel is allowed to amass nuclear weapons with impunity, I cannot fathom.

A growing movement in Britain is determined to challenge Trident. CND is flourishing, and the peace group Trident Ploughshares is due to launch a year-long daily blockade of the Faslane naval base starting on 1 October - the anniversary of the Nuremberg judgments. As part of this blockade, I will be joining more than a hundred other authors, poets, playwrights, publishers and journalists - including A Kennedy, George Monbiot, Jay Griffiths and Adrian Mitchell - at a "Power of the Word Block" in December. Our demand will be simple: the dismantling of Trident and an undertaking not to develop any new nuclear deterrent . . . oops, sorry, weapons of mass destruction.

Apart from the illegality, immorality and sheer inhumanity of Gordon Brown's decision to support Trident, there is the cost - something that might touch the Chancellor's heart even if a potential nuclear Armageddon doesn't. According to CND, this financial burden could total somewhere between £25bn and £40bn. By my calculations, that would be enough to equip every building in the UK with solar panels, making us self-sufficient in renewable electricity, slashing UK greenhouse-gas emissions, and making a real contribution in the only war that matters for the future of the planet - the war on climate change.

To support the Faslane blockade, go to (www.faslane365.org)

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