No Mr President: A nuclear blast won’t stop a hurricane
United States
Can humans stop a hurricane with a nuclear bomb? It’s a question that President Donald Trump reportedly asked of top national security officials and one that weather experts have long had to strike down.
The short answer: No. ‘‘Hurricanes produce so much more energy than a single bomb,’’ Corene Matyas, a professor in the University of Florida’s Department of Geography, said. ‘‘The scale is a huge mismatch.’’ Axios reported yesterday, citing unnamed sources, that Trump asked top Homeland Security officials whether the United States could bomb a hurricane to stop it from hitting the country.
Trump in a tweet yesterday denied the ‘‘ridiculous’’ report and called it ‘‘more FAKE NEWS!’’ Axios reported that the administration never acted on the idea.
However, the president is not the first to float the idea of using explosives, possibly nuclear ones, to halt the formation of a hurricane or change its course.
A blog post on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website by Chris Landsea of the National Hurricane Centre, which Axios cited, debunks the idea and concludes, ‘‘Needless to say, this is not a good idea.’’ While tradewinds would quickly move nuclear radiation to coastlines, which could devastate these environments, the central flaw of the idea is that a nuclear bomb, or a conventional weapon, simply wouldn’t create enough energy to alter a hurricane’s path.
A fully developed hurricane releases 50 to 200 trillion watts of heat energy, according to the blog post. That’s equal to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes, Landsea writes.
Matyas said most of a hurricane’s energy comes from the formation of its clouds and rain, compared to the energy in its winds – at a ratio of about 400 to 1. Given that and the sheer size of most storms, it would take upward of thousands of explosives before having an effect on a storm’s wind speed, Matyas said.
‘‘People just don’t understand how energy works and the scale of energy,’’ she added.
The NOAA post also explains that the shock waves from a nuclear blast wouldn’t raise the air pressure in the area around the storm.
Hurricanes and tropical storms are low-pressure systems. Landsea writes that normally the air’s pressure equals about 10 tonnes weighing down on each square meter of surface. The strongest hurricanes have about nine metric tonnes, he explains.
Downgrading a Category 5 storm to a Category 2 would require ‘‘a total of a bit more than half a billion tonnes for a 20 km radius eye.’’ ‘‘It’s difficult to envision a practical way of moving that much air around,’’ Landsea writes.
Preventing hurricanes from forming with weapons also proves a challenge given that so many tropical waves or depressions swirl in the Atlantic but never fully develop.
‘‘If the energy released in a tropical disturbance were only 10% of that released in a hurricane, it’s still a lot of power, so that the hurricane police would need to dim the whole world’s lights many times a year,’’ Landsea writes.
According to National Geographic, scientists in the past have even suggested humans try explosives to shift storms.
The head of US Weather Bureau, Francis W. Riechelderfer, said in 1961 that he could foresee that possibility, and Jack W. Reed, a meteorologist at Sandia Laboratory, suggested it in 1959 at a symposium on peaceful uses of nuclear weapons.
– USA Today