This intriguing backstory appeared in this morning's Washington Post.
Trump denies that he suggested
nuking hurricanes. But the government once studied the idea.
Washington
Post, August 26 at 6:40 AM
In
October 1935, roughly six weeks after a devastating hurricane laid
waste to the Florida Keys, a group of frustrated chamber of commerce executives
from the storm-battered cities of Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and Hollywood, Fla.,
got together to figure out what could be done about storms that mercilessly
pounded the state’s coast every fall, threatening the burgeoning tourist
economy.
The
solution they landed on was a novel one, and, conveniently, it didn’t require
anyone to move out of harm’s way. Instead, the executives suggested, the government
should simply try bombing hurricanes before they got to Florida.
“These
storms are not only local menaces,” Clyde Elliot, the secretary of the
Hollywood, Fla., Chamber of Commerce, reasoned. “They reach
Newfoundland frequently before they disburse, hence this control is really of
national importance.”
While
their proposal didn’t gain any traction, it wasn’t the last time the idea would
come up. On Sunday night, Axios reported that
President Trump has repeatedly urged senior Homeland Security and national
security officials to explore the possibility of using nuclear bombs to diffuse
hurricanes before they reach the United States, which would make him the latest
in a long line of politicians (and coastal property owners in Florida) who have
suggested fighting storms with military force.
Early
Monday, Trump denied ever pushing for the use of nuclear bombs against
hurricanes, tweeting that the Axios story was “ridiculous” and “Just more
FAKE NEWS!”
The
story by Axios that President Trump wanted to blow up large hurricanes with
nuclear weapons prior to reaching shore is ridiculous. I never said this. Just
more FAKE NEWS!
— Donald J. Trump
(@realDonaldTrump) August 26, 2019
Regardless
of Trump’s feelings on the subject, the idea of hurling bombs in the path of
incoming storms was once given serious consideration. Just weeks after the U.S.
dropped the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Floridians
started wondering if the same destructive force that had ushered in the end of
World War II could also be leveraged to protect beachfront property. Herbert A.
Frink, the mayor of Miami Beach, wrote a letter to President Harry S. Truman
urging him to look into it, while members of the Lee County Commission in
southwest Florida voted to offer the government a 7,500-acre tract that could
be used as a launchpad, historian Gary R. Mormino writes in “Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A
Social History of Modern Florida.”
But
scientists quickly poured cold water on the idea. The Florida officials had
been encouraged by reports that when the atomic bomb was tested in the New
Mexico desert, nearby storm clouds had disappeared. But one meteorologist pointed out that there was no evidence that those
two events were connected. Another warned that dropping a bomb in the middle of
a hurricane could potentially make the storm even worse.
Then,
there was the fact that atomic bombs weren’t exactly easy to come by. When the
question was raised again in 1950, not long after the
Korean War broke out, Grady Norton, the chief forecaster for the U.S. Weather
Bureau (now the National Weather Service) in Miami, cautioned that “this is no
time to waste bombs on hurricanes.”
“The
real problem facing us today,” he told the Fort Lauderdale
News, “is not ways to eliminate hurricanes, but instead the job of educating
people to take full precautionary measures when a storm occurs.”
That
logic evidently fell on deaf ears, because the advent of nuclear weapons
prompted a new round of speculation by the end of the decade. Though the atomic
bomb killed hundreds of thousands of people in Japan, the amount of energy it
yielded was negligible compared to a mature hurricane, Jack W. Reed, a
meteorologist at Sandia National Laboratories, explained in a 1959 paper. Nuclear weapons
didn’t come close, either, he wrote, but a massive amount of air was lofted
skyward when the hydrogen bomb was tested. If a submarine were to lob a nuclear
missile at the eye of a hurricane, he theorized, the warm air
fueling the storm would be lifted into the stratosphere. The hurricane might
not come to an immediate stop, but at least it could be weakened or slowed.
This
time, government officials appeared to take the idea into consideration. During
a 1961 speech at the National Press Club, Francis W.
Reichelderfer, the head of the U.S. Weather Bureau, revealed that the agency
planned to study whether bombing a hurricane would stop it in its tracks.
Asked
specifically about nuclear weapons, the meteorologist replied that they “might
do something to a hurricane, but he wasn’t sure if it would be good or bad,”
the Associated Press reported. It wasn’t
unthinkable that someday, the agency would hurl a nuclear bomb at a storm while
it was still far from land, he said, but there were some major obstacles. Tests
would cost millions of dollars, and the government needed to learn more about
the potential side effects first.
Needless
to say, those concerns won out. The FAQ section of National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration’s website now includes an explainer about why nuking a tropical storm
before it develops into a hurricane is “not a good idea.” It’s quite possible
that dropping a nuclear weapon would have no effect on the storm whatsoever,
and, even more pressingly, that the storm’s winds would carry radioactive
fallout to land, the agency explains. And, as National Geographic previously pointed out, doing so would
mean running afoul of the Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty, which the United
States and the former Soviet Union ratified in 1990.
But
like clockwork, the question seems to resurface every few years. In 2004,
during a particularly deadly hurricane season, Mary Aiken, an elected member of
the Hernando County, Fla., commission, called on NASA to find a way to stop the storms
before they could reach Florida, and likened Mother Nature to a terrorist.
“These
storms infuriate me,” she said, according to the Tampa Bay Times. “There
must be something that can be done. It’s like a war. This state looks like
Iraq.”
Informed
by the county attorney that government scientists had researched that question
before, only to realize that they ran the risk of combining a hurricane’s
powerful wallop with deadly nuclear fallout, Aiken wasn’t satisfied. The
agency, she declared, simply hadn’t been trying hard enough.
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