Ever since the end of the cold war between the communist world and the west we were meant to be intent on peace. The purpose of the so-called peace dividend was to bring us, not only a reduction in defence spending but a decrease in our pre-occupation with war and its accoutrements. It was to be peace, peace, peace, not war, war, war.

Some years down the line, peace is certainly playing a major part in the news with peace talks and the peace process being prominent both in relation to Northern Ireland and to the Middle East. However, talk of war, not to mention action - somewhere in the world is never very far away and the equipment of

war-making has been hitting the headlines recently in the form of arms.

Arms as we might expect, has connections with the limbs which bear them. The word in the sense of war-making equipment shares a common indo-European route, Ar- meaning to fit or join, with the word in the sense of upper limbs, but their means of entry into the language varied. Arms in its warlike meaning came into English via old French armes from Latin arma in the thirteenth century, but the anatomical arms is Old English with equivalent in several of the other germanic languages.

It is easy to associate the anatomical arms and the warring arms in terms of historical warfare when such weapons as swords and spears were used in hand-to-hand combat and when arms for military purposes were regularly both literary and figuratively taken up and laid down.

Likewise, it is easy to associate the two senses of arms later on when conflict involves hand-held guns, such as rifles, also known as firearms. However, arms does not seem very appropriate as a description of the equipment used in modern warfare.

The stuff of modern warfare includes not only things which are wielded by hand but things which can be operated from a distance, some too awful to contemplate. Modern warfare has nothing to do with swords and spears and, although hand-held guns are still used, their role has been largely eclipsed by missiles fired from afar, and by more sinister commodities such as chemicals and disease.

There is another word for the equipment associated with war, and it is weapons. Weapon, like arms in its military sense, is Old English in origin, but it has a shadowier, more uncertain past.

Unlike arms, it does not immediately call up association with other English words or meanings. All we really know about it is that it has close linguistic cousins in other germanic languages - German Waffe, Dutch Wapen and Swedish Vapen.

The word weapons seems less popular with the communication industry than arms. This is surprising since it has a slight edge on arms in terms of linguistic usefulness in that it has a common singular form. Arm in its military context is distinctly archaic.

The success of arms over weapons could be put down to the fact that, to commentators on war issues, arms is simply more user-friendly. For a start it takes up less space, not a huge advantage in terms of a long, analytical article on the subject of war, but a significant advantage in terms of a newspaper headline, particularly a tabloid headline. Arms row would have it over weapons row every time in such situations.

There is little doubt that its very succinctness has helped arms on its way. It has a glibness that the lengthier weapons cannot match. When nations are vying to outdo each other in accumulating things with which to kill each other, we refer to this as an arms race, never a weapons race, while a secret store of death-dealing equipment is usually known as an arms cache.

Arms is also fortunate enough to form a nice little alliterative partnership with affair. Weapons affair just doesn't stand a chance.

In the many scandals involving military equipment which seem periodically to emerge, arms is always the media's choice. It was the case in America in the mid-1980s when Oliver North was accused of adding to the military power of Iran - arms for Iran - and it is the case now in Britain when there is a furore over the question of British firms supplying military hardware to Sierra Leone - arms for Africa - Sierra Leone is even more handicapped lengthwise than weapons, and for purposes of the media it has become Africa. Arms for Africa is so much neater than weapons for Sierra Leone - and it does give a clue to those who were wondering where the focus of the trouble actually is.

Weapons, then, loses out on media appeal because of its length but I feel this may not be the full story. Most of us like to inhabit a cosy world which will exclude as far as possible the harsher realities of life.

The very combination of sounds in weapon results in a word that has a much more threatening, more dangerous ring to it than has arms, so we tend to avoid it.

Arms, on the other hand, is associated in our minds with many safe, comforting things - the arms of a mother rocking a baby, lovers locked in each others arms, the arms of a friend holding the bereaved.

Of course, our heads tell us that what is involved here is a different meaning of arms, but our heads do not always play the active part in our lives which they should.

It's at least possible that we are failing to react to arms as we should because of subconscious, sentimental associations. Let's hear it for weapons!

call to arms

how arms have appeared in The Herald recently

l The Government faces a legal bill of more than #1m after abandoning proceedings against directors of an arms firm involved in the Iraqi supergun affair

l An emphatic condemnation of the Indian nuclear arms testing emerged from the G8 summit

l The Government is under growing pressure over the arms-to-Africa affair

lWhile the Government would have preferred the IRA not to insist on hanging on to its arms, it was widely felt that the statement was generally supportive

l He just goes quietly about his arms-and-advice business, never troubling who pays the salary

l Yugoslav military sources said arms smugglers tried over the weekend to cross the border from Albania into Kosovo

l I relinquished my Service revolver, a different one from that surrendered to my Japanese captor who, by force of arms, won the right to demand it

l Julia picked Wee Gogsy up, tucked him under her arms, and stormed off through the exit