NO nation has ever voted to give up the bomb.

Scotland might just be about to be the first.

That, at least, is the way our referendum looks to international nuclear disarmament campaigners.

Ban-the-bombers across the globe, of course, don't care one way or another about this country's constitutional arrangements.

But they love the idea of a territory, any territory, essentially volunteering to disarm in a national plebiscite.

Last month Abolition 2000 - a sort of international equivalent of our own CND - met in Edinburgh and visited the UK's Trident base at Faslane on Gare Loch.

The event has gradually drummed up a lot of attention for the anti-nuclear stance of the SNP and its independentista allies in alternative media across Europe, not least in the Netherlands.

One of those inspired by the Scottish debate was Krista van Velzen, a former MP for the Dutch Socialist Party and now a campaigner for No Nukes in Amsterdam.

"I am jealous of the fact that you Scots have a referendum on independence," she said. "Because it's the first time a people will have the opportunity to vote on whether they want nuclear weapons."

Other nations have got rid of nukes. Canada won't have American weapons on its territory.

And both Kazakhstan and Ukraine gradually shipped out Soviet nuclear arms from their territories shortly after independence in 1991.

They did not vote to do so, however. Their governments, new and weak, simply responded to international pressure - backed in hard cash - to make sure only one nuclear state, Russia, emerged from the ruins of the USSR.

Wilbert van der Zeijden - a colleague of Ms van Velzen - has spotted the comparison.

"The independence of Scotland will, for international treaties, be regarded as a split of the United Kingdom," he wrote in a international peace magazine, NPT News in Review. "Scotland will not have to renegotiate every treaty of which it is part now.

"Like Ukraine or Kazakhstan, Scotland will find itself in the peculiar position of having nuclear weapons on its territory, to which it could in theory have just as much ownership rights as the remainder of the UK.

"But it does not want to take over the UK's role as a nuclear weapon state and it does not want bombs on its territory."

The rump UK state, van der Zeijden argued, would be at risk of breaching the terms of the international non-proliferation regime if it kept Trident in Scotland.

"It is the UK after all that maintains that the Trident weapons have nowhere to go but Clyde Naval Base in Scotland," he said. "So if Scotland exercises its sovereign right and ends the deployments ... where does that leave Trident?"

Vrij Nederlands - a high-minded left-of-centre news magazine first published underground during Nazi occupation - has picked up the buzz about the future of what it called Scotland's "English nuclear submarines".

Author Ko Colijn had a nice wee line, inspired by recent brinksmanship in the Far East.

Korea, he said, was made up of one nation in two states squabbling about nuclear armament.

The UK, he added, was two nations in one state squabbling about nuclear disarmament.

Colijn gives us some context. Scottish independence - and the threat to kick out Trident - comes just as Britain, and the MoD, slash budgets.

"If the Scots close the base on the Clyde, Trident's replacement and relocation will become very expensive indeed," he wrote. "That ratchets up the debate several notches, because suddenly the lofty ambitions of the United Kingdom as a 'world power' are in the balance."

Nato, he stressed, expected an independent Scotland to reapply for membership. "All the current member states will then have to agree," he said. "And that means the United Kingdom, which could attach the condition to Scotland's 'accession' that the Clyde must remain open.

"But Scotland is gambling that Nato will need the new state, with its strategic location in the north Atlantic, so badly that it will be able to play the nuclear free card.

"Great game! Maybe Cameron should lease a North Korean bay for Trident's replacement."

Can you sense the glee among international peaceniks at the threat posed by Scottish independence to Britain's nuclear might?

Then imagine the dread felt by some of London's strategic military partners, such as the United States and France, at the same prospect.

* Thanks to journalist Gordon Darroch and Scottish CND's John Ainslie for his help on this blog.