Two Days Ago I Reported That Trump Was Considering Restarting Nuclear Bomb Tests in Nevada – Well There’s More

June 6, 2020 – For those who think that the current President of the United States is contemplating exercising the country’s nuclear muscles, there are recent remarks made by Donald Trump that would have dire implications for the environment. Last year at the beginning of the hurricane season, the President asked U.S. Homeland Security and his national security advisors to explore dropping nuclear bombs into hurricanes to stop them before they come ashore in America.

The President is purported to have said during a White House discussion, “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?”

Apparently this was not the first time the President had suggested this as a method of dealing with hurricanes. And it is not the first time it has come up in government discussions with records in the Eisenhower administration of similar conversations. Of course, to talk about the idea in a group of informed individuals with scientific credentials is one thing. But in the rarified, unscientific administration of Donald Trump, the conversation may have been among some of the least science-knowledgeable people in the country.

So what is the science saying about nuking hurricanes?

From the National Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory of NOAA comes the following four points:

1. The amount of energy required to alter a hurricane’s behaviour has to be greater than the energy the storm itself produces. A hurricane releases energy in the form of heat at a rate of 5 to 20×10¹³ watts while only 10% of this is converted to wind. The release equals the energy of 10-megaton nuclear bombs being exploded every 20 minutes.
2.  A nuclear explosion produces a shock wave and temporarily raises the barometric pressure of the atmosphere temporarily. Hurricanes at the eye have very low barometric pressure. In normal atmospheric pressure, ten metric tons (1000 kilograms per ton) of air bear down on each square meter of the ocean or land surface. To change a Category 5 hurricane into a Category 2 you need to add a half-ton of air for each square meter inside the eye or a total of more than a half-billion (500,000,000) tons over a 20-kilometer eye radius. Moving that much air around is beyond any current technology humans have built.
3. Trying to attack a tropical depression off the African coast before it forms into a tropical storm and then a hurricane is not a solution either. About 80 tropical depressions on average form off Africa during hurricane season. We don’t have modeling to predict which ones will become a tropical storm and then a hurricane. So we would be considering bombing all disturbances when on average between 5 and 10% of them would become Category 1 or higher storms.
4. And then there is the radioactive fallout. If you drop a nuclear bomb into a hurricane the downwind areas from the storm would become saturated with radiation. And as the storm moved along its path the radioactivity would be further dispersed to cover a wide swath of territory.

When word of this leaked out Trump, of course, claimed he never said anything about nuking hurricanes. But like many of the “fake news” claims of this President, there is enough confirming sources within his administration to refute the denial.

And this week in the U.S. House of Representatives, Sylvia Garcia, a member from Texas introduced legislation to forbid the practice. The bill, H.R. 7075, prohibits “the President from deploying any strategic weapon, such as a nuclear bomb, for purposes of altering weather patterns or addressing climate change, and for other purposes.” It was referred to the House Committee on Armed Services, the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and the Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

In H.R. 7075 it states, “There is cause for concern to public health, safety, and national security by the dangerous misuse of nuclear bombs to alter serious weather patterns.” It requires the EPA and NOAA to produce a report to Congress annually that provides detailed data on hurricanes, including destructiveness, human lives lost, magnitude, and intensity. It also asks that analysis be provided on how human activities contribute to hurricanes. And finally, it specifies that a scientific explanation be included as to why the use of nuclear bombs to alter severe weather events like hurricanes produces unacceptable risks.

The desire to use nuclear weapons by Donald Trump in some capacity whether bomb tests or bombing hurricanes is disturbing enough without having to think that legislation may be needed to stop this type of thing from happening in this or any other future administration.