How to Use nuclear winter in a Sentence

nuclear winter

noun
  • The soot from burning cities and forests will blot out the sun and cause a nuclear winter.
    — Annie Jacobsen, TIME, 11 Apr. 2024
  • After the nuclear winter, it has been said, bright shoots will arise from the rubble.
    — Jamie Kitman, Car and Driver, 1 Jan. 2023
  • This is about the kids, and the challenge of surviving this nuclear winter of a school year.
    — Ellen McCarthy, Washington Post, 9 Aug. 2020
  • Bridich is trying to tap-dance around a nuclear winter that’s partly of his own making.
    — Sean Keeler, The Denver Post, 21 Jan. 2020
  • What followed were global wildfires, years of nuclear winter and acid rain.
    — Lorraine Boissoneault, Smithsonian, 24 May 2018
  • 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, 8 Sep. 2017
  • What if, instead of climate change or nuclear winter, we were delivered that deus ex machina?
    — New York Times, 20 June 2018
  • Not when the skies go dark with the asteroid version of a nuclear winter, dust and debris covering the sun.
    — Korey Haynes, Discover Magazine, 19 Nov. 2018
  • Some researchers say the asteroid, which may have led to a thermal pulse or something like a nuclear winter, is what did the dinosaurs in.
    — Valerie Ross, Discover Magazine, 13 July 2011
  • Thankfully, nuclear winter isn’t going to befall us quite yet.
    — Ed Yong, Discover Magazine, 22 July 2010
  • But what are the likely effects on global food production during a nuclear winter?
    — Matt Benoit, Discover Magazine, 7 May 2022
  • 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, 5 Oct. 2017
  • Grose herself remembers lying awake at night as a child worrying about nuclear winter.
    — Stephanie H. Murray, The Week, 25 Jan. 2022
  • During nuclear winter, wild foods surviving in tropical forests will include baobab trees, mopane worms, and palm weevils.
    — Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, Harper’s Magazine , 22 June 2022
  • Buildings are chard Brutalist monoliths, and the cold overcast skies overhead bring to mind nuclear winter.
    — Mark Hughes, Forbes, 8 May 2021
  • Then, in 1995, the volcano erupted, leaving the island looking like a nuclear winter.
    — Melinda Newman, Billboard, 20 Aug. 2021
  • The researchers are certain that the fish died within an hour of the asteroid strike, and not as a result of the massive wildfires or the nuclear winter that came in the days and months that followed.
    — Katie Hunt, CNN, 23 Feb. 2022
  • The study, published earlier this month by Earth's Future, found that seaweed will likely survive nuclear winter and could make a good food source.
    — Julia Gomez, USA TODAY, 31 Jan. 2024
  • The years that followed would have been like the apocalyptic nuclear winter that scientists say would follow a nuclear war, complete with raging fires and black-out skies.
    — Nola Taylor Redd, Smithsonian Magazine, 27 Apr. 2020
  • That’s because laurel has evolved to withstand fire, flood, nuclear winter, and, ultimately, Clayton.
    — Murr Brewster, The Christian Science Monitor, 3 Oct. 2022
  • But as Halloran points out, that number doesn't even take into account the nuclear winter that could devastate crops around the world and lead to a massive famine after such a war.
    — Sophie Weiner, Popular Mechanics, 11 Aug. 2017
  • In the dead of summer, nuclear winter is coming for a handful of Pac-12 schools excluded from the vicious realignment game.
    — Jon Wilner | , oregonlive, 4 Aug. 2023
  • The newspaper covered topics including survival in a nuclear winter, and how to deal with depressed teens who watch the TV special.
    — Peter Hartlaub, SFChronicle.com, 3 Oct. 2019
  • Robock, who previously showed the world how a nuclear winter could shroud Earth, studies SRM out of a sense of obligation.
    — Douglas Fox, Scientific American, 19 Sep. 2023
  • The impact would have thrown trillions of tons of dust into the atmosphere, blocking the sunlight and causing a worldwide nuclear winter, leading to the collapse of entire ecosystems.
    — David Bressan, Forbes, 9 Dec. 2021
  • The desire for scientists and others to share information during nuclear winter led to the Internet.
    — Andre Mouchard, Oc Register, 28 Sep. 2025
  • The threat to humanity's very existence would come after the war, when soot from massive fires ignited by the bombings would rapidly alter the climate in a scenario known as nuclear winter.
    — Stephanie Pappas, Scientific American, 21 Mar. 2023
  • After the blasts comes the fallout, the depthless smoke of nuclear winter, the ensuing end of the crops that sustain our mortal bodies, and the certain starvation of those too unlucky to have survived the war.
    — Ian Bogost, The Atlantic, 5 Jan. 2020
  • Fears of nuclear winter may have receded since the end of the cold war, Diaz-Maurin says, but research shows that the environmental consequences would be severe.
    — Stephanie Pappas, Scientific American, 21 Mar. 2023
  • Yu says these particles weren’t previously considered in nuclear winter models because of the assumption that they’ll be quickly degraded in the stratosphere.
    — Madeleine Stone, National Geographic, 8 Aug. 2019

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'nuclear winter.' 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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