How to Use thermonuclear in a Sentence
thermonuclear
adjective- Hydrogen bombs are thermonuclear weapons.
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Pandemics have become a threat on the scale of thermonuclear war.
—Mark Olshaker, Fortune, 20 Apr. 2020
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But a full draft opinion has never leaked to the press in the modern history of the court, and the reaction inside the marble palace will likely be thermonuclear.
—Matt Ford, The New Republic, 3 May 2022
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This thermonuclear reaction creates vast amounts of light and heat, allowing the star to shine.
—Phil Plait, Scientific American, 10 Nov. 2023
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Anything with a higher yield has to be either a boosted or a thermonuclear device.
—Andrew Karam, Popular Mechanics, 7 Jan. 2016
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The first full-scale demonstration of such a thermonuclear weapon was conducted in 1952 in the Ivy Mike test, just seven years after the first atomic bomb test of the Manhattan Project.
—OregonLive.com, 9 Aug. 2017
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Many are the remains of massive stars that collapsed after burning through their thermonuclear trust funds.
—Dennis Overbye, New York Times, 6 May 2020
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Analysts noted that the device in the photo that the North released on Sunday — whether real or a mock-up — was shaped like a two-stage thermonuclear device.
—Choe Sang-Hun and David E. Sanger, New York Times, 2 Sep. 2017
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In order to comply, the Navy was forced to take four Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines and their thermonuclear warheads out of service.
—Popular Mechanics, 28 Apr. 2023
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Some of us have to get positive, find some good and forget there’s a decent chance a global thermonuclear war may start any second over a Twitter insult.
—Tony Hicks, The Mercury News, 17 Feb. 2017
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Some scientists argue that the age of humans — also known as the Anthropocene era — began in 1952, when the U.S. tested its first thermonuclear bomb.
—Mansee Khurana, NPR, 3 Apr. 2024
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An article on Friday about the Doomsday clock misstated the timing of the first thermonuclear weapons tests by the Americans and the Soviets.
—New York Times, 29 Jan. 2018
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Hydrogen bomb: Also called a thermonuclear weapon, this type of bomb is much more powerful than an atomic bomb.
—Popular Mechanics Editors, Popular Mechanics, 7 Feb. 2018
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But his personal trainer offered a few choice words to the internet, not so much burning that bridge as dropping a thermonuclear warhead on it.
—Des Bieler, chicagotribune.com, 23 June 2017
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The chemistry is thermonuclear and the desire is mutual, Libra.
—Colin Bedell, Cosmopolitan, 11 Mar. 2018
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The thermonuclear weapon uses fusion to create a far more powerful blast than an atomic bomb, according to The Atlantic.
—Mirren Gidda, Newsweek, 6 Jan. 2016
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Five billion years hence, our sun, too, will exhaust its thermonuclear fuel supply.
—Alan Hirshfeld, WSJ, 16 Nov. 2018
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That a global audience from Washington to Pyongyang and beyond was agape at such a once inconceivable tete-a-tete in the wake of threats of thermonuclear war and scathing personal insults, is not in doubt.
—Washington Post, 12 June 2018
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This 20-meter rocket, designed to carry thermonuclear weapons, served as a template for the original Delta rockets.
—Eric Berger, Ars Technica, 17 Sep. 2018
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The country is lobbing bombs like water balloons, and Trump is saber-rattling in return as if global thermonuclear war is not a possibility and this is the second level of a TV game show.
—Rochelle Riley, Detroit Free Press, 3 Sep. 2017
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Detonate a thermonuclear weapon to blast a crack several hundred meters deep in Earth’s surface.
—Tim Folger, Discover Magazine, 13 July 2014
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Only four years later, the first thermonuclear weapon, Ivy Mike, was detonated, adding a new layer to the nuclear discussion.
—Christian Schneider, National Review, 21 Dec. 2023
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Also, once the country built atomic bombs, followed by more powerful thermonuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, the danger of their use would only increase, including to U.S. allies.
—Jon Talton, The Seattle Times, 25 Aug. 2017
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The nova, a giant thermonuclear explosion, lingered as a bright spot between two stars in the constellation Wei—a part of Scorpius—for 14 days before vanishing.
—Richard A. Lovett, Science | AAAS, 30 Aug. 2017
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The reentry vehicle did not carry a live thermonuclear warhead.
—Kyle Mizokami, Popular Mechanics, 5 Feb. 2020
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That may be a return to normal: The paranoid atmosphere of 2017 is really not so different from the one at the end of the Cold War, when we elementary-school students were being taught to duck under our desks in the event of thermonuclear warfare.
—Kevin D. Williamson, National Review, 11 Sep. 2017
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However, the good news—for certain values of good—is that the sort of fallout radiation provided by standard thermonuclear weapons has a reasonably short half-life.
—Rupert Goodwins, Ars Technica, 25 Nov. 2017
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Pyongyang’s threat to conduct an atmospheric thermonuclear test is perhaps the most provocative action the regime could take, short of mobilizing for an attack.
—Adam Mount, The Atlantic, 22 Sep. 2017
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The authors say their results provide a unified theory of how this transition occurs, whether in a chemical explosion on Earth or a thermonuclear one in space.
—Edd Gent, Science | AAAS, 31 Oct. 2019
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The arms race had escalated beyond the point of reason, with both sides matching the other’s capacity to destroy the planet several times over using thermonuclear weapons.
—Jordan Runtagh, PEOPLE.com, 13 Jan. 2020
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'thermonuclear.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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