It was fitting that Labour Party leadership contender Jeremy Corbyn chose to launch his Defence Diversification policy on Hiroshima Day.

Every August 6, people in Japan and around the world remember the horror of the first of two bombs designed to kill the maximum possible number of human beings.

On one of the few days of the year when the mass media allow dissident voices to be heard challenging Britain’s possession of nuclear weapons, these are always ‘balanced’ by military and political figures trotting out all the miserable excuses seeking to justify the cold-blooded mass murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians.

No such “balance” applies on the other 364 days of the year, of course, when the British Establishment peddles its pro-nuclear weapons propaganda without fear of public contradiction.

Yet opinion polls indicate that one-quarter to a third of the adult population in Britain continues to oppose our possession of nuclear weapons. An even bigger proportion of people, as many as two-thirds, oppose the renewal of the Trident system, even more so when the question is asked in the context of government spending priorities.

But who speaks for them at election time? Who talks the language of humanity on this issue?

The Greens, the SNP, Plaid Cymru, the Communist Party and other small socialist organisations campaigned for unilateral nuclear disarmament during May’s general election.

All year round, CND and the Stop the War Coalition point out the immorality, hypocrisy and sheer waste of maintaining our expensive nuclear arsenal. They will now be joined by the newly relaunched Peace Assembly, Britain’s affiliate of the anti-imperialist World Peace Council.

Despite the sterling efforts of such bodies, however, the biggest political parties in Britain all still favour the renewal of Trident, backed by every national daily newspaper except the Morning Star — which also happens to be the one paper banished from all television and radio reviews of daily press coverage.

The election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the biggest opposition party would dramatically alter the terms of public debate, not only on nuclear weapons but on almost all other aspects of foreign policy.

For the first time in decades, however hostile and distorted the coverage, the media would have to report arguments against Nato membership and Britain’s subservient relationship with US military and political power.

It will be claimed within and beyond the Labour Party that unilateral nuclear disarmament is a sure-fire vote loser, as it supposedly was in 1983 and 1987. Those critics often overlook the fact that the party’s disunity on the issue did much more damage than the stance itself.

On the first occasion, former Prime Minister James Callaghan’s eve of poll denunciation of his own party’s policy was a calculated act of sabotage. On the second, new Labour leader and one-time CND badge wearer Neil Kinnock could barely conceal his eagerness to ditch Labour’s non-nuclear defence policy.

Under Corbyn, Labour would have the option of uniting around a principled leader and the only policy that befits a civilised society.

The party would then have five years to promote a conventional defence policy which, in line with his Defence Diversification report, puts the skills of armaments workers to socially productive use and puts Britain in the forefront of the struggle for world-wide nuclear disarmament.