IT might be more helpful to measure the power of modern nuclear weapons in “Hiroshimas” rather than megatons of TNT.

Each of Britain’s four Trident submarines carries up to 48 warheads, each with eight times the explosive power of the bomb which destroyed Hiroshima. That’s 384 Hiroshimas per submarine.

But Britain’s nuclear stockpile is tiny compares with those of Russia and the US. The world’s total nuclear arsenal is estimated at 200,000 Hiroshimas - surely more than enough to extinguish all life on this planet.

These weapons are designed to obliterate entire cities and annihilate civilian populations. Their use could never be anything other than a war crime or an act of genocide.

Commendably, Jeremy Corbyn has said that he would never commit such a crime.

Are we to assume that those who have castigated him for this (including the Prime Minister and members of Labour’s shadow cabinet) would actually be prepared to sanction war crimes?

Supporters of the doctrine of MAD (mutually assured destruction) will say I am missing the point. Of course we wouldn’t really use nuclear weapons, but we can’t tell our enemies that, can we?

This has led comedian Andy Hamilton to propose a simple solution to the problem. We scrap Trident, but we don’t tell anyone it has been scrapped.

Pete Winstanley, Durham