Of or pertaining to
One class of adjectives are those that, rather than indicating properties of entities, indicate relationships between multiple entities. These are often found in dictionaries with the phrase of or pertaining to (or of or relating to) in the definition. One example of a word with both relational and (say) qualitative meanings is educational. One meaning, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, is ’serving to educate, instructive,’ as in an educational film. The other is ‘of or relating to education,’ as in educational policy. Given the vagueness of “pertain,” it should be expected that some of these “pertinative adjectives,” or “pertainyms,” as they are sometimes called (e.g., WordNet) have a wide range of meanings and can indicate several types of relations (or, if you prefer, denote several classes of objects). As a case study, let’s look at nuclear.
One source for a wide range of uses of this word is the Nuclear Threat Initiative website. In particular, the country profiles sometimes have long documents attached to them that describe the nuclear activities of the nation. I’ve selected South Africa, just because it has a varied selection of uses. In the Nuclear Overview documents (including chronology, import/export, facilities), the following words appear following nuclear, classed generally into three classes of meaning:
(nuclear fission) power, material, technology (energy from nuclear/atomic fission) weapon, reactor, explosive, device, fuel, missile, (weapons with fission-powered explosives) explosion, test, option, non-proliferation (science and technology of nuclear energy and/or nuclear weapons) import, engineering, expertise, technician, export (any or all of the above) overview, experience, collaboration, activity, program, capability, material, capacity, development, supplier, trade, research, nation, facility, industry
And this is just within the domain of the harnessing of nuclear fission for energy-generating or weapon capability; it doesn’t even begin to touch, for instance, nuclear membrane, nuclear palsy, nuclear tone, nuclear household, nuclear reaction, and so on and so on.