Cleavage fracture is the most dangerous form of fracture. Cleavage fracture usually happens well before general yielding at low nominal fracture stress and strain. Cleavage fracture is often spurred by low temperature and determines the toughness in the lower shelf temperature region. This paper describes a new framework for the micromechanism of cleavage fracture of high strength low alloy (HSLA) steel weld metals. Cleavage fracture not only determines the impact toughness in the lower shelf but also plays a decisive role on the impact toughness in the transition temperature region. The toughness is determined by the extending length of a preceding fibrous crack which is terminated by cleavage fracture. Three non-stop successive stages, i.e. crack nucleation, propagation of a second phase particle-sized crack across the particle/grain boundary, propagation of a grain-sized crack across the grain/grain boundary are explained. The "critical event" of cleavage fracture is emphasized which offers the greatest difficulty during crack formation and controls the cleavage process. The critical event indicates the weakest microstructural component and its critical size which specifies the local cleavage fracture stress σ_f for cleavage fracture. In toughness-study it is paramount important to reveal the critical events for various test specimens. Three criteria for crack nucleation, for preventing crack nucleus from blunting and for crack propagation are testified. An active region specified by these criteria is suggested where the combined stress and strain are sufficient to trigger the cleavage fracture. It can be used in statistical analyses. A case study, using the new framework of micromechanism for analyzing toughness of 8%Ni steel welding metals is presented to analyze the experimental results.