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Earth Science

Fighting Climate Change By Nuking Hurricanes

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
August 26, 2019
Filed under ,
Fighting Climate Change By Nuking Hurricanes

Trump suggested nuking hurricanes to stop them from hitting U.S., Axios
“During one hurricane briefing at the White House, Trump said, “I got it. I got it. Why don’t we nuke them?” according to one source who was there. “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?” the source added, paraphrasing the president’s remarks. Asked how the briefer reacted, the source recalled he said something to the effect of, “Sir, we’ll look into that.” Trump replied by asking incredulously how many hurricanes the U.S. could handle and reiterating his suggestion that the government intervene before they make landfall. The briefer “was knocked back on his heels,” the source in the room added. “You could hear a gnat fart in that meeting. People were astonished. After the meeting ended, we thought, ‘What the f—? What do we do with this?'”
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Keith’s note: As best as I can understand the physics of nuking a hurricane, you’d need to drop a bunch of nukes to have any effect (if any) and that it would not be much. But the net result of using any nukes on a a hurricane would be to create a nuclear contaminated hurricane that would spread nasty things far and wide. But there is a bright side. We could use the hurricane nuking as a geoengineering test for Elon Musk’s proposed plans to nuke Mars as part of a terraforming plan.
Why don’t we try to destroy tropical cyclones by nuking them ?, NOAA

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

26 responses to “Fighting Climate Change By Nuking Hurricanes”

  1. MAGA_Ken says:
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    A source said that?

    Wow a source, it must be true.

    Trump probably saw a documentary on nuking hurricanes on the Gorilla Channel then he asked someone at NOAA about it. Hell, it must be a common question considering there is a FAQ on it.

    Are hurricanes such a recent development since the host has decided to tie to climate change?

    • tesh says:
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      Why defending the indefensible.

      Leave it at “discrediting” the source.

      Everything else works against your stance.

      • MAGA_Ken says:
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        I’ve had enough of anonymous sources with unverifiable information. I’m sure you lap it up though.

        But even so, a layman suggesting nuking an hurricane is not so unusual that NOAA actually has a FAQ on it.

        • kcowing says:
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          And I let you post here as MAGA_Ken. Are you afraid to use your realtime? I use mine. Why are you so afraid to tell us who you are?

          • MAGA_Ken says:
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            I don’t make myself out to be a journalist nor am I giving any exclusive information.

            You inadvertently prove my point. Modern day “journalism” based exclusively on anonymous sources is the functional equivalent to comment board posting.

          • kcowing says:
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            Coward.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      It is very easy to imagine situations in which important, relevant, or interesting data is made available to journalists, conditioned on the anonymity of the source.

      The source’s motivation could reasonably be any number of reasons: fear of losing one’s job comes to mind, but there are others, including, as in the case of Watergate, the certainty of prosecution. And while many other less dramatic motivations could be imagined, one cannot ignore the possibility that the source’s information is misleading, or wrong, or a deliberate lie intended to mislead.

      What’s to be made of this situation? Should critical data be withheld if the source cannot be identified? The answer? No.

      At this point another important player enters the picture: the journalist. It’s her job to verify the data, to assess the reliability of the source, and to provide context.

      And, finally, the last player: the reader. Readers always come to news reports with a point of view. It’s the natural human condition. It is also proper, since at least in part it informs skepticism.

      In the end, though, the question is a simple one, and it is this: can the journalist be trusted? What is the record of honesty and straightforward reporting? Did the reporter verify the data from other sources?

      I don’t waste my time reading reporters that I don’t trust.

      You’ll make up your own mind about your confidence in the reporting on this particular website. My own view: when nasawatch.com quotes a ‘source’, I’m confident that the homework has been done. This confidence is in no way ‘blowing smoke.’ Like other reputable news organizations, Keith gets no free rides. Every story starts from the same baseline: get it right or go home.

      <opinion> And I’d add this: the generalized, consistent censure and disparagement of reporters – driven largely by political point of view – continues to inflict deep harm to our great country. </opinion>

  2. ThomasLMatula says:
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    Actually this was something that the A.E.C. studied in the 1950’s/1950’s as part of Project Plowshare. I expect there is an old report floating around online in some archive.

    But yes, based on what we know now it’s a bad idea, just as using Nukes for gas fracking was another bad Project Plowshare idea. But they actually set off Nukes in Colorado and New Mexico to test it.

    Found it, or at least a paper on it by Dr. Reed. It starts on p-78 and talks about using nuclear weapons to steer hurricanes into open ocean.

    https://babel.hathitrust.or

    You know a paper like this was almost sure to make its way into the old Science Fiction Pulps. You have to wonder if perhaps President Trump used to read them as a kid.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      Lots of ideas floated around, as you probably know better than I do, as folks debated ‘Atoms For Peace’- I think that was the name?

      Using nukes to create a new Panama Canal, or widen the existing one, were also widely discussed. And why not? Nukes were entirely new then, and there was considerable pressure to find a positive use after the awfulness of Hiroshima.

      • ThomasLMatula says:
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        Yes, lots of ideas. One of my professors at NMT actually worked on Plowshare. He spent an entire lecture in one of my geoengineering classes on using nukes for fracking gas, construction, etc., especially creating harbors. Here is a list of the actual tests done.

        https://www.osti.gov/openne

        • fcrary says:
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          It wasn’t just us. My mother was working as a technical editor for the International Atomic Energy Agency, when they organized a conference on the subject. The one idea from that which I don’t think is in your document on Plowshare was creating a hydrothermal power source (about a decade of power for a small city) from a subsurface detonation in the water table. I’m not even sure how that could have seemed like a good idea at the time.

      • fcrary says:
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        There are some peaceful applications which have already been done (well, as side effects.) Active seismology is one. Normally, when you hear about it, it’s using seismometers to detect or monitor nuclear tests. But there is good information content about the Earth’s interior as well. There were also some studies of the Earth’s upper atmosphere from a few of the Bikini island above ground tests, observed at the antipode from aircraft flying out of Bermuda. And glaciologist can take an ice core and very easily determine what depth in the ice corresponds to 1945. They can occasionally do that with ash from very large volcanic eruptions, but the radiation count is pretty reliable for samples collected anywhere in the world.

    • Zed_WEASEL says:
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      Keith is wrong about a couple of things in his article note.

      You need a lot more than a bunch of nukes to affect a hurricane, more like a great many thousands of them in the MT range.

      AIUI, fusion devices don’t produce a lot of fallout unless you design for it like encasing the nuke initiator with an uranium case.

      But no matter how little fallout from a nuke. The number of nukes required and how to ignite them in sequence after delivering them over a wide area render the nuke-a-cane option moot.

      • fcrary says:
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        A statement from NOAA mentioned that the latent heat transfer in a hurricane is something like a megaton per minute. But I don’t think that’s a reasonable comparison. The idea would be to disrupt the circulation system, not to blast the whole storm apart. That could require a substantially lower amount of energy. If, somehow, you could apply it at exactly the right place and time. I don’t think that’s possible, and I suspect trying and setting off a device at the wrong place or time could make things worse. Well, worse in addition to the radiation. And in addition to making some countries with marginally sane leaders think tossing around fusion devices is ok. (By the way, you’re almost but not quite right about fallout. It’s primarily vaporized and activated material from the target. So ground detonations are much worse than airbursts. But the bomb itself does contribute as well, and even a modern, efficient one doesn’t consume all the fuel.)

      • e_ballen says:
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        Hmmm …. many thousands of nuclear bombs in the MT range to affect one hurricane. And here I thought if everyone just drove a Prius we could finally get on the righteous path to government managment of the climate. Because that’s a good thing.

        I see Obama “The-Oceans-Are-Rising” just bought a $15 million mansion a few feet from the shore in Martha’s Vineyard. Based on photos, rising oceans do not seem to have been a concern. Odd.

        Will there be another meeting in Greece in which 114 private jets are flown in to discuss the issue?

        And Michael Mann, the creator of the “hockey stick graph” that seemed to show temperatures on the upswing and formed the basis of the 2001 UN Climate Report and Al Gore’s movie “Inconvenient Truth”– and most western governments policies — just had his case dismissed because he refused a direct court order to provide the data and regression numbers used to construct the graph …

        But hardly worth pointing out such news compared to some unsourced comment allegedly made by Trump.

  3. Reavenk says:
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    It feels like he’s been dying to find a reason to set of nukes since day 1, and we just won’t let him.

  4. mfwright says:
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    Too bad Trump didn’t announce this a couple weeks sooner, Scott Manley could have included it in his Aug 23 YT video,
    https://www.youtube.com/wat

  5. Michael Spencer says:
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    Watching a recent House subcommittee meeting, I was stunned by the level of questions asked of the Administrator (who responded with aplomb).

    In this case, at the very least the President knows where hurricanes form (not all of them, of course, but still), as well as the path, and the fact that they rotate.

    Yes, standards have fallen that low.

  6. Shaw_Bob says:
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    The Soviet Union actually *did* try out a few civil engineering nukes!

  7. John Campbell says:
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    Hurricanes are fueled by HEAT.

    IJust what we need, more heat. If we could chill ’em down…

  8. David_McEwen says:
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    I swear, this country is toast. The level of ignorance, anti-intellectualism, and antiscience is astonishing.

  9. Not Invented Here says:
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    Hopefully this would result in more government research into geoengineering, although given the reaction of the staffers I’m not holding my breath.

  10. Seawolfe says:
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    Do we have a NAME for this source? Was this taped or just someone “recalling” this? I realize that Keith doesn’t like the person currently in the White House, but using unnamed sources puts this article on the level of the late Weekly World News.

  11. kcowing says:
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    Closing comments since the Trump supporters are upset 😉