World Notes BRITAIN

Having lost the past two national elections armed with a platform of unilateral nuclear disarmament, the Labor Party last week launched a strike against that controversial policy. Its national executive committee overwhelmingly adopted a proposal to scrap a 1981 commitment to dismantle Britain's nuclear arsenal without any quid pro quo from other countries.

Instead, Labor will emphasize British ties to NATO while espousing the goal of ridding the world of nuclear weapons by the year 2000. Labor's new position, which must be approved at the party's annual conference in October, also asks NATO to abandon its flexible-response strategy based on possible use of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons and to renounce first use of nuclear arms.

Although Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ridiculed the announcement as "unilateralism in a different wrapping," she stood to lose a valuable advantage: an opposition wedded to policies that guaranteed its remaining in opposition. As Tony Blair, 36, Labor's spokesman on energy and one of its rising stars, emphasized, "The changes simply had to come. We couldn't continue to live in the past."