Part 12 – International security

Talk about English © BBC Learning English
Page 1 of 7
bbclearningenglish.com


BBC Learning English
Talk about English
Insight plus
Part 12 – International security


Clip
News stories [full transcript is not available]

Gary: In this series, we’re considering the major themes that appear in BBC World
Service news programmes. Today’s “big story” is international security. We’ll
focus on some of the issues and, of course, the language behind the topic.
Rupert Pengelley is technical editor for Jane’s Information Group – an
organisation that publishes information about defence operation, technologies
and transport. The group produces publications such as: “Jane’s Defence
Weekly”, “Jane’s Fighting Ships”, “Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft” … and one
of its newer titles is “Jane’s School Safety Handbook”.
Rupert Pengelley lives in South-West London, and I took a short train journey
to meet him to get some expert advice.
Clip
Train





Talk about English © BBC Learning English
Page 2 of 7
bbclearningenglish.com


Clip Rupert Pengelley
Gary: Now as part of my preparation for our interview today, I did a search on the BBC
News website. I typed in the word “weapon” and got some 2,071 search results. Is there any
way, first of all, that we can categorise the kinds of weapons that appear in the world, and are
reflected in news stories?

Rupert: I think the … obviously … the kinds of weapon that immediately come to mind are
rifles, and you know artillery pieces … if you like, the conventional weapons. But what you
see mostly are so-called small arms. These are the type of weapon you can carry in your
hands. But weapons, of course, take many different forms, information itself is regarded as a
weapon to the extent if you can influence somebody to do what you want them to do by
bombarding them with either threats or with information that would lead them to the
conclusion that it would be silly to resist, then that war of words has done the fighting for you.
But at the other extreme, of course, you get so-called weapons of mass destruction, which are
loosely taken to mean nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, which are those which are not
readily aimed at particular points. Their effect is rather too wide-ranging, much more widely
ranged, ranging than an artillery shell, for example.

Gary: You referred earlier to “conventional” weapons, and another term I’ve heard is “non-
conventional” or “unconventional” weapons – what exactly do we mean by those? Is it to do
with nuclear and chemical and biological weapons?

Rupert: That’s a very difficult one. Conventional weapons are those which have existed down
the ages – meaning rifles or machine guns or canon of one kind or another. It's extended to
include aircraft with their bombs and so on. But, unconventional weapons, ironically, tend to


Talk about English © BBC Learning English
Page 3 of 7
bbclearningenglish.com


mean, terrorist weapons … or can mean terrorist weapons … those which are made up of
everyday items from the High Street. You could describe that as an unconventional weapon.
But it can also mean, as you’ve suggested, chemical or biological weapons.

Gary: Rupert Pengelley from Jane’s Information Group. More from him later.
The area of definitions was a good starting point when I spoke to our Defence
Correspondent, Jonathan Marcus. My first question for him was about the
phrase “international security”. In the context of our World Service news
bulletins, what does “international security” mean?

Clip Jonathan Marcus, BBC World Service Defence Correspondent
I think people listening to our news are clearly going to hear a lot of stories that deal with, for
example, fighting in Iraq. They’re going to hear stories about the spread of so-called weapons
of mass proliferation – that’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and of course the very
long range missiles that are used to carry those weapons. They’re going to hear a lot of stories
about what people refer to as international terrorism.

Clip
George W. Bush [full transcript is not available]

Clip Jonathan Marcus, BBC World Service Defence Correspondent
Gary: Well, let’s look at this issue of international terrorism, if you like. And we sometimes
hear the phrase “war against terrorism”. Who’s involved in that war? Who’s the enemy?



Talk about English © BBC Learning English
Page 4 of 7
bbclearningenglish.com


Jonathan: I think it’s a controversial term. I mean, clearly the idea of a war against terrorism
is very much the position of the Bush Administration in the US. They affectively declared a
war against terror in the wake of the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon
in New York and Washington respectively. It’s quite clear that there is a growing
phenomenon of a form of terrorism which sees simply large casualty tolls as one of its goals. It
tends to be a form of activity that is very much directed against the West and particularly
against the US and its allies. It’s a little difficult because, clearly, if you have the war, one
assumes there’s a set of targets you can attack. And, of course, that is much more difficult
because people who are branded as terrorists often tend to be distributed in a host society.
They’re very difficult to track down – very difficult to pinpoint.

Gary: As you’ve said, it’s very hard to identify where this war is taking place. Will we ever
know when it’s over?

Jonathan: Well, I think that is another of the … I think you’re right to ask that question …
because that is another one of the areas where, perhaps, using this word war is not perhaps
terribly appropriate. In a normal war, if you want to call it that, there are military
engagements, there are battles, there are clashes. Sadly, people die. Usually there is some
form of conclusion. I think the so-called war against terrorism is very difficult and very
different. I think this is something a little like crime. You might as well say there is a war
against crime. The question is how you best go about minimising it, fighting it, and dealing
with it when it erupts.

Gary: A comfortable sitting room in South-West London seems an odd place to find
oneself talking about acts of war and terrorism. And in my conversation with
Rupert Pengelley of Jane’s Information Group, we moved on to a discussion of


Talk about English © BBC Learning English
Page 5 of 7
bbclearningenglish.com


the weapons that are frequently mentioned in news bulletins.
Clip Rupert Pengelley
Well, let’s take missiles in themselves, as a generic category, as a general grouping. A missile
is deemed to be a rocket which is guided. A missile is a more discriminatory weapon than a
rocket. One has guidance in and the other doesn’t. Now, an air-to-air missile is simply that
which is fired from one aircraft against another. An air-to-ground missile or air-to-surface
missile is one which is fired from the air against something which is on the land, or against
something which is at sea?

Gary: So can you have a surface-to-surface missile as well?

Rupert: Exactly right. And that’s precisely what a Scud missile is. A Scud is, of course, a
particularly well-known one, which is closely related to the V2 rocket … so-called in WW2 …
but it’s one to which a rudimentary form of guidance has been put – such that it will come
down within a few kilometres of the target against which it’s fired.

Gary: And what about a Cruise missile then? What’s a Cruise missile?

Rupert: A Cruise missile is generally one which is … flies in the atmosphere, and therefore
takes a flatter trajectory and goes more slowly than a ballistic missile. A ballistic missile has a
great looping trajectory … possibly all the way up into space, and then it comes down in a sort
of vertical trajectory onto the top of its target. A Cruise missile will fly following the contours
of the earth towards its target, and will do lots of turns and so on to confuse people on the
ground as to where it’s heading. And it is very accurate – much more accurate than Scud
missile, for example.


Talk about English © BBC Learning English
Page 6 of 7
bbclearningenglish.com


Gary: The next category of words I’ve picked out are all to do with bombs, I think: Smart
bombs, dirty bombs. Maybe we could talk about those. What’s a Smart bomb?

Rupert: Smart was the word which was invented about 15-20 years ago to describe a bomb
… which is a cylinder full of explosives with fins on the end which you dropped from a great
height. And they attached the word Smart to it to signify that it had some form of guidance.
And in some cases, the guidance was clever than others. So it went from being a guided bomb
to a Smart bomb, which usually means it has two or three types of guidance in it.

Gary: Now it strikes me that any kind of bomb is not something you’d want landing anywhere
near where you are … but what do we mean by a dirty bomb?

Rupert: A dirty bomb is a version of a nuclear weapon. It’s normally considered to be an
improvised device, in which someone has taken a mass of radioactive material and put
explosive, conventional high explosive inside that lump. And then triggers the high explosive
to blow the radioactive material over a wide area. And that sits there radiating for years, and
the effect is that you have to evacuate that area.

Gary: And so, in that case, the dirty element is the radioactive material?

Rupert: Yes I mean it’s metaphorically dirty – it’s dirty in the sense that it leaves radiation
everywhere, and it’s dirty in the sense that it is an underhand, disallowed category of weapon.




Talk about English © BBC Learning English
Page 7 of 7
bbclearningenglish.com


Gary: Rupert Pengelley.
As we’ve heard, there’s a great deal of specialist, technical vocabulary
associated with stories about war and international security. How does this
affect those who work as journalists and news reporters? I asked Defence
Correspondent, Jonathan Marcus.

Clip Jonathan Marcus, BBC World Service Defence Correspondent
If you start speaking as if you are a soldier, or an arms salesman, or a minister of defence in a
government, you are going to lose your audience pretty quickly. People don’t necessarily have
the same vocabulary, the same terms and so on. So I think in a sense you have to do a little bit
of a translation, you have to translate some of these things into terms and phrases that ordinary
people will understand.

Gary: Our defence correspondent, Jonathan Marcus, one of a number of BBC
journalists who have the difficult task of reporting on acts of violence
throughout the world.