Donald Trump reportedly wants to nuke hurricanes: Here’s why that’s a terrible idea Aside from the fallout and the fact it would break nuclear treaties, it simply wouldn’t work

According to an Axios report, President Donald Trump “suggested multiple times” that nuclear bombs could be used to prevent hurricanes from reaching the United States.

President Trump reportedly said “I got it. I got it. Why don’t we nuke them?” during a hurricane briefing at the White House, speculating that dropping a bomb “inside the eye of a hurricane” would disrupt the storm. According to Axios’ source, the room’s reaction was stunned silence, while the briefer replied with words to the effect of “Sir, we’ll look into that.”

It’s apparently not the only time President Trump has suggested this particularly explosive method of defending the US against hurricanes. A 2017 National Security Council memo reportedly describes President Trump asking whether hurricanes could be bombed in order to stop them from hitting the US.

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Shortly after the Axios story was published, #ThatsHowTheApocalypseStarted began trending on Twitter, with many users expressing similar levels of astonishment as were reported within the White House meeting. Democratic candidate Kamala Harris also responded to the report, tweeting simply “Dude’s gotta go.”

What would happen if you dropped a bomb into a hurricane?

President Trump isn’t the first person to come up with the idea of nuking hurricanes. In a 1959 paper, meteorologist Jack W. Reed suggested that a submarine could travel underwater into the eye of a hurricane and launch nuclear missiles upwards into the storm. He speculated that the ensuing explosion could disrupt the temperature structure of the hurricane, which would then reduce the wind speed and weaken the storm. Then in 1961, Francis W. Riechelderfer, the head of the US Weather Bureau, said he “could imagine the possibility someday of exploding a nuclear bomb on a hurricane far at sea”.

The idea was never tested — but it almost certainly would not have worked. The key problem is the amount of energy needed: hurricanes release a massive quantity of energy, even compared to nuclear weapons.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the US government agency which warns of major weather incidents, calculated that the heat release of a fully developed hurricane was equivalent to that of a 10-megaton nuclear bomb every 20 minutes. They also worked out that to shrink a Category 5 hurricane down into a Category 2 hurricane, you’d need to move about 500,000,000 tons of air into the eye of the hurricane — something which basically can’t be done.

Then there’s the problem of fallout. If a nuclear bomb was detonated inside a hurricane heading towards the United States, it would not only fail to stop it: it would also produce a substantial amount of deadly radioactive fallout, which the hurricane would proceed to spread liberally over the rest of its journey.

Finally: it’s not allowed. Under the Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty between the US and the former Soviet Union, non-military nuclear weapons can’t exceed 150 kilotons — far less than the amount you’d need to make a dent in an oncoming hurricane.