Cause a result opposite to that intended

Usage examples of backfire.

On a terse command from their carrier, they went to afterburner and rocketed southwest toward the Backfires.

The only problem being, of course, that whenever you ran an operation that was not aboveboard there was a certain risk of it backfiring into a worse situation than it had been before.

Ubiqtorate agent was starting to wind down now, and with a flicker of private amusement Carib realized that for once the old intimidation tactic had backfired.

Confirm the one-regiment Backfire raid downbound, over Reykjavik right now, estimated course one-eight-zero.

Then the Hutu strategy backfired, and by August the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front was in power in Rwanda, and somewhere between half a million and a million Hutus had become refugees in other countries, mainly Zaire.

With an AS-6 Kingfish missile hanging under each wing, the Backfires, too, were potentially vulnerable, but the Backfire had the ability to run at high Mach numbers and stood a fair chance at survival, even in the face of determined fighter opposition.

A minute later, the seventy Backfire bombers launched their hundred forty AS-6 Kingfish missiles and turned north at full military power.

The last of the Backfires had just launched their missiles and were turning back northeast at full power as the Eagles raced at twelve hundred knots to catch up.

In essence, the document implied that not only was preemption unnecessary in the case of Iraq but could backfire and bring about the very disaster it was intended to avert: the provision of WMD by Saddam to terrorists who sought to destroy America.

Fearing that his control was threatened, he ordered large-scale arrests and executions, which backfired and destabilized his regime for months afterward.

Sometimes, however, this lack of caution backfired, because Mercedes would be on all fours hiding behind a lilac bush or some tulips, and she would pop up with her pitching arm going like balls of fire as soon as Harlan entered the invisible but well-marked sphere of her range, and without fail her sudden appearance, plus the accuracy of her pellets, would give the big blubbery man such a start that on several occasions he actually fell down from surprise, and he almost always emerged from these sneak attacks with his heart thundering in a terribly unhealthy manner.

An inner hatch closed underneath its tailfins, protecting the other probes from backfire.

A hands-off policy had backfired, the insurgents had gathered strength.

Two men had been killed and another seriously hurt when one of the rail-mounted port pieces had backfired, blowing apart its removable breech.

The sudden loss of his Backfire force-it would be out of action for another five days-forced him to take his dedicated anticarrier submarine teams and send them against the convoys, which meant crossing NATO's picket line of submarines, and losses there were heavy, too.