• Controversy: A website claims that Trump suggested using nuclear bombs against hurricanes
  • Study: Hurricane Climate Engineering
  • Climate change: Less hurricanes but more destructive

Donald Trump has denied on Monday that he has considered the strategy of using nuclear weapons to stop the hurricanes that so many victims and material damage cause each year in the United States and in the countries of Central America. He has done so via Twitter just a few hours after the Axios news portal reported that the US president would have suggested "on multiple occasions" to members of the National Security team to study whether it would be possible to use atomic bombs to deactivate hurricanes before That will touch earth.

" It's ridiculous. I've never said anything like that. It's just another fake news ," Trump wrote amid his busy day of meetings today at the G-7 Summit that hosts the French town of Biarritz.

The truth is that the idea of ​​preventing a hurricane from reaching a territory using nuclear weapons is not something new and from time to time comes up as a strategy to try to make it less destructive. So much so that the Institute of the Atmosphere and the Ocean of the USA (the prestigious US NOAA) has a complete explanation on its website in which its scientists argue "why we have never tried to end tropical cyclones by bombarding them".

Radioactivity

"In every hurricane season there are always suggestions that nuclear weapons should simply be used to destroy the storms. Apart from the fact that it would not even alter the storm, this proposal obviates the problem that the radioactivity released would quickly move with air currents. towards terrestrial areas, causing devastating environmental problems , "say NOAA scientists. "Needless to say, it is not a good idea," they add.

As detailed below, the main scientific reason why using explosives to change the behavior of a hurricane is not an effective modification technique is the large amount of energy it would take to achieve it . A fully developed hurricane is capable of releasing thermal energy equivalent to that generated by a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes, converting less than 10% of that heat into mechanical wind energy. By way of comparison, the 1993 World Almanac estimated that all mankind used during the year 1990 less than 20% of the energy released by a hurricane .

Even focusing only on mechanical energy, being able to dispose only half of the necessary energy at a point in the middle of an ocean would be formidable, according to researchers at this American institute.

Launch missiles from a submarine

These are just some of the scientific arguments against the proposal that the meteorologist Jack W. Reed made for the first time seriously in 1959, an idea that received no support from his colleagues. In short, it occurred to Reed that a submarine could be placed under the eye of the hurricane, from where it would detonate one or more nuclear missiles. The explosion would cause the warm air concentrated in the eye of the hurricane to move into the stratosphere. The coldest air around would occupy the place where the warm air was, which would theoretically reduce the speed of the winds and weaken the tropical storm.

What if an attempt was made to deactivate a depression or storm in the beginning, before it became a hurricane? NOAA experts also reject this possibility because " there is no way to know in advance what phenomena will end up becoming a hurricane " (of the approximately 80 that form each year in the Atlantic, about five end up being hurricanes, according to their figures) .

Not to mention international conflicts. In1968 the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was signed and in 1996, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty (TPCEN, or CTBT) for its acronym for Comprehensive Nuclear-Test- Ban Treaty), which prohibit nuclear tests. It was then Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru who in 1954 proposed that all evidence of nuclear explosions across the planet be eliminated.

The conclusion is that using nuclear missiles would be inefficient, extremely expensive, illegal and, above all, would cause an environmental catastrophe . A much more dangerous remedy than the hurricanes themselves, whose season in the Atlantic officially began on June 1 and will end on November 30. However, nature does not understand calendars and this year, the subtropical storm Andrea moved forward, causing damage since May 20.

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