firebreak

• fire break

fire +‎ break

firebreak (plural firebreaks)

1. An area cleared of all flammable material to prevent a fire from spreading across it.

   The firefighters used a bulldozer to clear a firebreak in the forest to try to contain the forest fire.

2. (figurative) Any separating barrier.
   • 1984, Dietrich Schroeer, Science, Technology and the Nuclear Arms Race, page 293:

     That policy could consist of a statement that the declaring nation would not be the first to use nuclear weapons. This would strengthen the firebreak between the use of conventional and nuclear weapons.

   • 2012, Daniel Levine, Recovering International Relations: The Promise of Sustainable Critique, page 112:

     First, it serves to demonstrate that the practice of sustainable critique […] need not be impossibly philosophically rarefied […] Second, it serves as a firebreak against the unrelieved negativity that, it is sometimes charged, follows from Adorno's practices of reflexivity.

• firetrail (Australia)

• firebreak on Wikipedia.Wikipedia