ARMIES love euphemisms. They help to soften unpleasant talk of shooting things and killing people. The British Army's futuristic new tank is known as the Future Rapid Effects System, which like our recently-noted Military Information Support Operations manages to use four words to say nothing at all. We could be talking about a tank, but we could equally be discussing some kind of high-tech washing powder that cleans clothes in half the time.

But not all military euphemisms are so blatant, and the subtler they are, the more prone they are to entering everyday and journalistic language.

Britain is currently pondering whether to replace its nuclear-armed Trident submarines. It is striking that virtually every British media outlet follows the government line in talking delicately about the nation's "nuclear deterrent", rather than "nuclear weapons". You might expect it from the right-wing Daily Telegraph, but the leftie New Statesman uses it too, even while bashing the programme for not being sufficiently independent of the United States. (Fans of Noam Chomsky will see here a nice illustration of his contention that even "critical" media tend to absorb the government mindset on matters of national security.)

Besides being weaselly, the phrase "nuclear deterrent" is a little misleading. Properly speaking, it means a deterrent of a nuclear nature, but that tells you nothing about what it's meant to deter; it might as well be a deterrent against tanks (sorry, Future Rapid Effects Systems), or cockroaches, or tourists. Clearly, we're meant to understand that it deters nuclear attack, but in that case it should be a nuclear-weapons deterrent. And to exclude other kinds of anti-nuclear-weapon systems like laser guns or smart missiles, it ought to be a nuclear nuclear-weapons deterrent.

Which is why it would be more honest just to call it a nuclear weapon. After all, deterrence describes just one thing you can do with the weapons, rather than the weapons themselves, which can just as easily be used to intimidate or obliterate. It is worth noting that the same newspapers have no problem speaking of Indian or Chinese "nuclear weapons", even though both those nations have publicly claimed a strictly defensive "no first use" policy, something Britain has never embraced outright.

Is this particular euphemism restricted to Britain? It's fairly easy to find articles in the American press speaking plainly about America's nuclear weapons. But it'd be interesting to know what form of words is used in the Russian, Chinese and Hindi press when talking about their own country's bombs. Anyone?