“…However, previous fundamental work (Averbach, 1965;Tetelman and McEvily, 1967) clearly shows the strong effect of plastic deformation, in the form of inhomogeneous arrays of dislocations, on microcrack nucleation which also contributes to trigger cleavage fracture at the material's microlevel. Based upon direct observations of cleavage microcracking by plastic strain made in ferritic steels at varying temperatures (Brindley, 1970;Lindley et al, 1970;Gurland, J., 1972), the microcrack density can then be further generalized in terms of…”