“I got it. I got it. Why don’t we nuke them? They start forming off the coast of Africa, as they’re moving across the Atlantic, we drop a bomb inside the eye of the hurricane and it disrupts it. Why can’t we do that?”
– Donald Trump
In another of his “like… really smart” moments, Donald Trump suggested to senior Homeland security and national security officials that we could drop a nuclear bomb in the hurricanes to disrupt them and divert their path, according to a report by Axios.
A source said that the briefer was “knocked back on his heels” and just replied, “Sir, we’ll look into that.”
“You could hear a gnat fart in that meeting. People were astonished. After the meeting ended, we thought, ‘What the fuck? What do we do with this?'” – the source added further.
But the questions remains, can we nuke a hurricane? If we drop a nuclear bomb into the eye of hurricane, why would it fail?
1. An Average Hurricane Has the Energy to Power the World for 200 Years
Seeing how powerful and energetic an average hurricane is, a nuke exploding in its eye is nothing more than a minor glitch. According to a report by Hurricane Research Division of NOAA, United States:
- A fully developed hurricane releases 50-200 trillion Watts of energy
- An average hurricane’s wind energy is about half of the world’s electricity production in a year
- Energy released by a single hurricane as it forms clouds is 200 times the world’s annual electricity use
And this scale is just for typical hurricanes, not the immense ones like the recent Hurricane Irma or the recent Hurricane Maria that caused massive devastation in Puerto Rico.
2. We’ll Have to Drop 2000 Hiroshima-Level Bombs Per Hour
According to NOAA, a single hurricane releases energy same as the explosion 10-megaton nukes every 20 minutes. That’s 666 times more than the energy of “Little Boy” – the bomb US had dropped on Hiroshima in the World War II. That means we’ll have to drop 2000 “Little Boys” every hour to match the energy of a hurricane.
3. Requires Moving Half a Billion Tons of Air To the Eye of Hurricane
The basic principle of nuking a hurricane is based on the concept that hurricanes are essentially low-pressure zones and an explosion inside can increase the air pressure by driving the warm air upwards, as cold air from the surroundings rushes in to fill the low-pressure zones and disrupt the storm.
According to Chris Landsea, a reputed meteorologist:
Converting a category-5 hurricane to a category-2 would need moving half a billion tons of air within a 20-km radius area. It’s difficult to envision a practical way of moving that much air around.
It just doesn’t work. As the bomb’s initial high-pressure shockwaves move outwards, the hurricane’s surrounding air pressure would immediately return to same low-pressure state. Only way to counter this to continuously keep dropping nukes as long as the hurricane lasts. That would be thousands of nuclear bombs being dropped per hour, needing a large-scale delivery system of airplanes, submarines, and missile launch systems.
4. Nuking A Hurricane Means Creating A Nuclear Hurricane!
Mostly likely outcome of blasting a hurricane with a nuke is that it’ll come back to bite us, even more vicious and lethal. Our arsenal of nuclear bombs will fail to disrupt the hurricane and what we’ll get in turn is a nuclear hurricane.
Released radioactive fallout would fairly quickly move with the tradewinds to affect land areas and cause devastating environmental problems. Needless to say, this is not a good idea.
– National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration
The nuclear radiation and fallout from the explosion would also cause damage to places that aren’t even touched by the hurricane.
Damn It.
As we know that Trump has often claimed that his “nuclear button” is “bigger” than Kim Jong Un’s, we can say that it’s only his misfortune that he won’t get a chance to play with it. Not even for disrupting hurricanes.
Although, Trump later took to twitter and denied that he ever wanted to nuke hurricanes, calling the claims ridiculous and FAKE NEWS!
Featured Image Courtesy: Observer
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