Axios: Trump suggested dropping nuclear bombs into hurricanes to stop them from hitting the U.S.
Andrew Lockley
https://www.axios.com/trump-nuclear-bombs-hurricanes-97231f38-2394-4120-a3fa-8c9cf0e3f51c.html
Scoop: Trump suggested nuking hurricanes to stop them from hitting U.S.
President Trump has suggested multiple times to senior Homeland Security and national security officials that they explore using nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes from hitting the United States, according to sources who have heard the president's private remarks and been briefed on a National Security Council memorandum that recorded those comments.
Behind the scenes: 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?'"
Trump also raised the idea in another conversation with a senior administration official. A 2017 NSC memo describes that second conversation, in which Trump asked whether the administration should bomb hurricanes to stop them from hitting the homeland. A source briefed on the NSC memo said it does not contain the word "nuclear"; it just says the president talked about bombing hurricanes.
- The source added that this NSC memo captured "multiple topics, not just hurricanes. … It wasn't that somebody was so terrified of the bombing idea that they wrote it down. They just captured the president’s comments."
- The sources said that Trump's "bomb the hurricanes" idea — which he floated early in the first year and a bit of his presidency before John Bolton took over as national security adviser — went nowhere and never entered a formal policy process.
White House response: A senior administration official said, "We don't comment on private discussions that the president may or may not have had with his national security team."
- A different senior administration official, who has been briefed on the president's hurricane bombing suggestion, defended Trump's idea and said it was no cause for alarm. "His goal — to keep a catastrophic hurricane from hitting the mainland — is not bad," the official said. "His objective is not bad."
- "What people near the president do is they say 'I love a president who asks questions like that, who’s willing to ask tough questions.' ... It takes strong people to respond to him in the right way when stuff like this comes up. For me, alarm bells weren't going off when I heard about it, but I did think somebody is going to use this to feed into 'the president is crazy' narrative."
The big picture: Trump didn't invent this idea. The notion that detonating a nuclear bomb over the eye of a hurricane could be used to counteract convection currents dates to the Eisenhower era, when it was floated by a government scientist.
- The idea keeps resurfacing in the public even though scientists agree it won't work. The myth has been so persistent that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. government agency that predicts changes in weather and the oceans, published an online fact sheet for the public under the heading "Tropical Cyclone Myths Page."
- The page states: "Apart from the fact that this might not even alter the storm, this approach neglects the problem that the released radioactive fallout would fairly quickly move with the tradewinds to affect land areas and cause devastating environmental problems. Needless to say, this is not a good idea."
About 3 weeks after Trump's 2016 election, National Geographic published an article titled, "Nuking Hurricanes: The Surprising History of a Really Bad Idea." It found, among other problems, that:
- Dropping a nuclear bomb into a hurricane would be banned under the terms of the Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union. So that could stave off any experiments, as long as the U.S. observes the terms of the treaty.
Atlantic hurricane season runs until Nov. 30.
Jessica Gurevitch
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineerin...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/geoengineering/CAJ3C-04XLOrj8p%3DQ%3DK0Y7_q0G%2B2F7aPaX0jy%2B-v_yW4E1jG5xA%40mail.gmail.com.
Jim Fleming
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/geoengineering/CA%2BPtSAMJYDzP6xgacfGDn1Vk4Jv%2BfjrPV19k%2B%2BZ_NSRr1S_5hQ%40mail.gmail.com.
--
Charles A. Dana Professor of Science, Technology, and Society, Colby College
Profile: http://www.colby.edu/directory/profile/jfleming
Series editor, Palgrave, https://www.palgrave.com/us/series/14581
Email: jfle...@colby.edu
"Everything is unprecedented if you don't study history."
David Appell
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/geoengineering/CAKg5Obam%2Bx%2BfwAMAXmAVb%3D7NrmpOKgnsRuAw6QoAjK_Swznugw%40mail.gmail.com.
m: Keizer, Oregon, USA
Ernie Rogers
Urtabulak: gas well fire
In 1966, a nuclear explosive was detonated at Urtabulak gas field in Southern Uzbekistan in order to extinguish a gas well fire that had been burning for almost three years and had resisted numerous attempts at control. The gas fountain, which formed at pressures of almost 300 atmospheres, had resulted in the loss of over 12 million cubic metres of gas per day through a 200 mm casing – enough to supply a city the size of St Petersburg. Two 445 mm holes were drilled that aimed to come as close as possible to the well at a depth of about 1500 metres in the middle of a 200 metre thick clay zone. One of these came to within about 35 m of the well and was used to emplace the special 30-kiloton charge which had been developed by the Arzamas weapons laboratory. Immediately after the explosion the fire went out and the well was sealed.
This was the first of five PNEs used for this purpose, and all but one was completely successful in extinguishing the fire and sealing the well. No radioactivity above background levels was detected in subsequent surveys of any of the sites.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/geoengineering/CA%2BPtSAMJYDzP6xgacfGDn1Vk4Jv%2BfjrPV19k%2B%2BZ_NSRr1S_5hQ%40mail.gmail.com.
Michael MacCracken
Just a couple of follow-ups based on hopefully not too foggy a memory:
1. If one calculates the latent heat release rate from a large
hurricane (so take an area of the rainfall, and a rainfall rate of
say 6 inches in a day over that area), one can then compare to the
energy of a nuclear weapon, just to get a sense of relative
magnitudes. When I did so several decades ago, as I recall that
the rate of latent heat release (as one metric of the energy a
hurricane is processing) was equivalent to a few megatons per
minute (now this energy is not all dissipated as most is
transformed into rising motion that returns as heat when air
elsewhere is pushed down, but even if a few percent goes to
friction loss with the surface, one gets a sense of why the
destructive path can look like a war zone). The size of most
nuclear weapons in current arsenals is perhaps at most a couple of
hundred kilotons, and in any case, a megaton explosion would take
its energy well up into the stratosphere. So it is really hard to
see how using even a dozen nuclear explosions could do much of
anything, even as a storm was forming, especially as it is heat
that is driving the intensification of the storm. And one would
have no idea what the outcome would be, if anything at all--and
since pretty much each storm system is unique, there really is no
good baseline. Basically, the idea is ridiculous.
2. I once got invited to Teller's office to answer whether nuclear explosives could be used to break the California drought in the mid-1970s or so. I rough estimated the energy involved in the drought (foregone latent heat release), ocean temperature anomaly said to be diverting the storm track, and month-long effect of the excess albedo due to midwestern snow cover that was also suggested to be a cause--each came out at something 10**21 calories. A megaton is 10**15 calories. So even if one could imagine a 1% trigger to change things, it was still 4 order of magnitude. Teller was said to be an order of magnitude thinker--I put these numbers on his blackboard and that was the end of that idea (not his, but one of his proteges--and not Lowell Wood, but ET did want an analysis).
3. On the Alaska harbor idea, the book about it is "The Firecracker Boys", and the idea was to make a good harbor as the basis for economic development. Environmental analysis pretty quickly showed the risks to the food chain and health as radionuclides got taken up in moss and then the reindeer ate the moss and then the people ate the reindeer, etc. It was study of this and a few other such ideas that led, as I understand it, to formation of the Office of Biological and Environmental Research (or some similar name) within the AEC. That office later became the Office of Health and Environmental Research in DOE and got started on climate change research back around 1978. Also, much of the research done on radionuclide paths to people, etc. turned out to be really useful (in addition to making clear the risks of using nuclear explosions to make a harbor) for figuring the heavy metal dose to people from such pollutants as mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants. So, not in vain.
Mike MacCracken
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/geoengineering/CA%2BsAiBRnO6S_zC%2BBx5D_jXZ0CgsfCbE150Og6JBH_c_4Zmi_WQ%40mail.gmail.com.
Hawkins, David
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/geoengineering/067c0c94-e4b9-3e50-9868-c2ec3bb73e31%40comcast.net.
Alan Robock
Thanks for these reminiscences. When I was in the Peace Corps in the Philippines in 1970, I learned that an Air Force General there had asked the US for a fleet of planes and nuclear bombs to destroy the typhoons that threaten the Philippines. It was pointed out to him at the time that you would end up with radioactive typhoons. So the scale analysis you describe below was already well known. Of course, he just wanted the airplanes. (A typhoon is exactly the same as a hurricane - just a different name, origin from the late 16th century: partly via Portuguese from Arabic ṭūfān (perhaps from Greek tuphōn ‘whirlwind’); reinforced by Chinese dialect tai fung ‘big wind’, in a different part of the world.)
Alan Alan Robock, Distinguished Professor Associate Editor, Reviews of Geophysics Department of Environmental Sciences Phone: +1-848-932-5751 Rutgers University E-mail: rob...@envsci.rutgers.edu 14 College Farm Road http://people.envsci.rutgers.edu/robock New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8551 USA ☮ http://twitter.com/AlanRobock
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/geoengineering/067c0c94-e4b9-3e50-9868-c2ec3bb73e31%40comcast.net.
Michael MacCracken
Hi Alan--On your reminiscence, if one exploded the nuclear
weapon(s) out over the ocean so there was not a dirt surface that
would be radiated and lofted into the atmosphere as radioactive
fallout, I'm not sure that much of the radioactivity would have
ended up on particles and then stayed aloft given the torrential
rain. Perhaps radioactive gases might have been created, but they
would have been rapidly lofted up in the air flow and carried out
the top of the system such that the storm coming ashore somewhat
later would not have been likely to have much of the radioactive
gas cloud in it--any radioactive gases that were in the atmosphere
I would think would have been thrown out the top and been
dispersed over a very wide area (greatly diluted, but very broadly
spread). In any case, good they did not give the idea a test.
As I recall, the first order of magnitude estimate I did on hurricanes was in 1965 for a seminar class taught be Chuck Leith (https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/31392) and Mike May (https://cisac.fsi.stanford.edu/people/michael_m_may) on Geophysical and Astrophysical Hydrodynamics (Mike was soon thereafter made Livermore Lab director and may have been Lab director the summer you were at Livermore). As to the calculation, I divided the amount of rainfall from a reasonably sized hurricane by the use of water by New York City, and finding a reasonable hurricane's daily rainfall amount would supply New York City with water for 5 years. Tropical cyclones put out a lot of rain.
Best, Mike
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/geoengineering/1ac0a2e1-94f4-1cbb-f52b-eefadd17e069%40envsci.rutgers.edu.
Ernie Rogers
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/geoengineering/e25797a2-93a2-49e4-a6d7-17e53e1cfb6c%40comcast.net.
Stephen Salter
Hi All
I have sent the attached note on suppressing hurricanes and typhoons with Lathams' idea for marine cloud brightening to a number of you with a request for corrections or different input assumptions. Perhaps this a good time to repeat the request.
If we already had the fleet of spray vessels it would be too late for this year. We should have started last November and tracked sea surface temperatures to some value agreed by endangered countries.
It would be useful if they could start the discussions now to be ready for years ahead.
Stephen
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/geoengineering/e25797a2-93a2-49e4-a6d7-17e53e1cfb6c%40comcast.net.
-- Emeritus Professor of Engineering Design School of Engineering Mayfield Road Edinburgh EH9 3DW +44 (0)131 650 5704
Juergen Scheffran
Dear All,
regarding historical linkages between geoengineering, nuclear
weapons and missile defense, you may read my article published
today in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2019.1654256
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2019.1654255
and the Magazine's commentary on using nukes for planetary changes:
https://thebulletin.org/2019/08/things-you-shouldnt-nuke
Jürgen Scheffran
--