How to Use thermonuclear in a Sentence

thermonuclear

adjective
  • Hydrogen bombs are thermonuclear weapons.
  • Garwin drew the plans for the very first thermonuclear weapon.
    — Sean Illing, Vox, 23 June 2024
  • Pandemics have become a threat on the scale of thermonuclear war.
    — Mark Olshaker, Fortune, 20 Apr. 2020
  • Anything with a higher yield has to be either a boosted or a thermonuclear device.
    — Andrew Karam, Popular Mechanics, 7 Jan. 2016
  • Five billion years hence, our sun, too, will exhaust its thermonuclear fuel supply.
    — Alan Hirshfeld, WSJ, 16 Nov. 2018
  • Many are the remains of massive stars that collapsed after burning through their thermonuclear trust funds.
    — Dennis Overbye, New York Times, 6 May 2020
  • This thermonuclear reaction creates vast amounts of light and heat, allowing the star to shine.
    — Phil Plait, Scientific American, 10 Nov. 2023
  • That leaves would-be innovators with only the hard-to-reach stuff, like thermonuclear fusion and a cure for cancer.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 20 July 2012
  • There are now thousands of thermonuclear weapons on high alert, and in less than an hour, the great cities of the world could be reduced to radioactive rubble.
    — Daniel Holz, Chicago Tribune, 5 Apr. 2026
  • There’s also a thermonuclear flash that sets everything on fire and melts lead, steel, and titanium.
    — Sean Illing, Vox, 23 June 2024
  • Modern thermonuclear weapons rely on what is called a plutonium pit.
    — Andrew Paul, Popular Science, 9 Jan. 2025
  • The reentry vehicle did not carry a live thermonuclear warhead.
    — Kyle Mizokami, Popular Mechanics, 5 Feb. 2020
  • 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
  • Detonate a thermonuclear weapon to blast a crack several hundred meters deep in Earth’s surface.
    — Tim Folger, Discover Magazine, 13 July 2014
  • 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
  • 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
  • The chemistry is thermonuclear and the desire is mutual, Libra.
    — Colin Bedell, Cosmopolitan, 11 Mar. 2018
  • Unlike stars, which generate energy from thermonuclear fusion in their cores, brown dwarfs are too small to have ongoing fusion power.
    — Phil Plait, Scientific American, 19 June 2026
  • 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
  • The material sits on the surface of the white dwarf until there is enough material to ignite a thermonuclear runaway explosion -- a buildup of pressure and heat.
    — Julia Jacobo, ABC News, 31 Oct. 2024
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • When this gas goes through the thermonuclear runaway process (the explosion in the nova), the lack of these elements is amplified, leading to a lower abundance in the explosion's remnants.
    — Victoria Corless, Space.com, 20 Mar. 2025
  • 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
  • But would the United States engage in thermonuclear war over a sparsely populated swath of Arctic Norway?
    — Ben Taub, The New Yorker, 9 Sep. 2024

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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