So perhaps the idea of bombing hurricanes is, yeah, not too fin-tastic. According to a new report from Axios, President Donald Trump has “suggested multiple times” to senior homeland and national security officials that they should “explore using nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes from hitting the United States.” It didn’t take long for people on Twitter to ask: Wait, isn’t that what happens in “Sharknado”?

Our president wants to implement policy ideas he got from watching Sharknado 3, this is not a drill https://t.co/zDtIWleDdp — Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) August 25, 2019

SHARKNADO is trending. I wonder why 🤣🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/r6T0POucbf — Meme Adjacent (@memeadjacent) August 26, 2019

Cinematic parallels:

Trump talking about diffusing hurricanes (2019) // Sharknado (2013) pic.twitter.com/jPTv9gdiRw — Natalie Martinez (@natijomartinez) August 25, 2019

The president subsequently denied he had suggested such a plan.

The story by Axios that President Trump wanted to blow up large hurricanes with nuclear weapons prior to reaching shore is ridiculous. I never said this. Just more FAKE NEWS! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 26, 2019

Axios responded that it stands by its reporting. As early as 2013, the “Sharknado” movies used explosives to thwart deadly fish-based storm systems. So would the “Sharknado” strategy of launching bombs into storms work for real-life hurricanes? “For the record, while small incendiary explosives may be effective against sharknadoes, nuclear weapons CANNOT snuff out the much larger hurricanes,” Thunder Levin, who wrote the first four “Sharknado” movies, told HuffPost. “They just make radioactive hurricanes, and red or blue, I’m sure we can all agree that would be worse.” An article by Live Science from 2012 seems to support Levin’s assessment: There’s also the possibility that bombing the hurricane, if it had any effect at all, would just add to the storm’s heat supply, making it even stronger. The idea of nuking storms has actually been around since the Eisenhower era, according to Axios, and has come up enough over the years that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published an FAQ page denouncing it. Even in “Sharknado,” bombs can blow up in your face. In the first installment of the franchise, Ian Ziering’s character, Fin, breaks up the final storm using a car carrying a bomb; however, in “Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!,” explosions can’t do the trick. Instead, David Hasselhoff’s character is forced to deploy a giant space laser to stop a sharknado wall from destroying the East Coast, aka “Feast Coast.”

Illustration: Damon Dahlen/HuffPost; Photos: Getty