nuclear winter

noun

|Updated on: 8 Jun 2018

Definition of nuclear winter

: the chilling of climate that is hypothesized to be a consequence of nuclear war and to result from the prolonged blockage of sunlight by high-altitude dust clouds produced by nuclear explosions

Recent Examples of nuclear winter from the Web

What followed were global wildfires, years of nuclear winter and acid rain.

— lorraine boissoneault, Smithsonian, "How the Ancestors of Birds Survived the Dino-Killing Asteroid," 24 May 2018
Toronto was working with a friendly cap environment and had room to build out the supporting cast; Portland's roster is already incredibly expensive and the rest of the league is creeping toward financial nuclear winter.

— andrew sharp, SI.com, "NBA Playoff Lessons: Bad News For The Blazers, The Rule For Modern Big Men, And More," 20 Apr. 2018
The brilliance of his plan is its simplicity: an atomic exchange with North Korea will bring on nuclear winter.

— Cincinnati.com, "Column: The world is a befuddling orb," 20 Sep. 2017
Inevitably that gives rise to doubts about the firm’s strategy, which is to slash costs and sit tight, hoping the industry’s nuclear winter ends.

— The Economist, "Goldman Sags," 5 Oct. 2017
Doing so, the thinking went, would avert another long, playoff-free nuclear winter, such as the one Kansas City had experienced between 1986 and 2014.

— ben reiter, SI.com, "The Royals' Last Dance: Kansas City Bet Big On Another Run With Its Core. Will It Pay Off?," 11 Sep. 2017
How to describe Seattle skies this past week, skies that should be blue but instead looked like a nuclear winter?

— erik lacitis, The Seattle Times, "How to describe Seattle’s recent smoky skies? We turned to the experts — artists and writers," 8 Sep. 2017
Nuclear gamesmanship suggests that a first strike is a mistake, since in time, a retaliatory strike may very well ruin the striker and possibly all of us in a political nuclear winter.

— dan rockmore, Slate Magazine, "According to Game Theory, the Senate Is Already Lost," 6 Apr. 2017

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'nuclear winter.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.