Apparently he asked his top security advisers more than once…
During a meeting about an impending hurricane hitting America, President Donald Trump reportedly made the following statement:
“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?”
According to US news outlet Axios, an unnamed person in the room responded with “We’ll look into this.”
It was also reported that Trump asked pretty much the same question back in 2017 to a senior official.
On the one hand, this does seems like a very Trump response to a potential problem. There’s a hurricane coming? Fire a nuclear bomb at it. Yeah, that does sound like something he might suggest.
However, the National Geographic published an article (mere days after Trump came into power) titled Nuking Hurricanes: The Surprising History of a Really Bad Idea.
There are two specific highlights from that article:
(1) The head of the U.S. Weather Bureau said he could “imagine the possibility someday of exploding a nuclear bomb on a hurricane far at sea.” Albeit, this was back in 1961, so… there’s that.
(2) There is an entire web page on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration dedicated to answering the question “Why don’t we try to destroy tropical cyclones by nuking them?” That enough people have asked the question that it requires its own web page is disconcerting, but the NOAA answer it in detail here, or, as they put it much more succinctly: “Needless to say, this is not a good idea.”
Not THAT needless, apparently…
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