0 past simple and past participle of defuse
2 to make a difficult or dangerous situation calmer by reducing or removing its cause:
But it can be defused by making a slight change that was required in any event.
The 1985 coup was much more swiftly defused.
However, this project was not notably successful and moreover the tensions, which it might have been expected to generate, were defused.
So the tension between the property-owner plaintiff's claim for remedy and the absence of fault on the imperilled-trespasser defendant's part is, on this account, defused.
They do not study the cases of serious ethnic tension which get successfully defused.
They are mainly moments of avoidance, when conflicts are defused, for, from our observation, it appears that in most cases, potentially conflicting social interactions eventually get defused.
However, this threat had now been defused.
Our troops have rebuilt bridges, reopened roads and defused dozens of small local crises that never reach the newspapers.
