President Donald Trump has suggested dropping nuclear bombs on hurricanes before they hit the United States, the US news website Axios said on Sunday.
According to Axios, Donald Trump asked at a meeting on hurricanes whether it would be possible, to prevent them from forming completely at sea, to drop an atomic bomb on their center. According to an anonymous source quoted by Axios, the people who attended the meeting came out perplexed. The site does not specify when this meeting would have taken place.
An old scientific theory
The idea put forward by Donald Trump is not new, however Axios specifies. It was originally issued in the 1950s by a scientist who worked for the US government, under the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower. Since then, the idea has resurfaced regularly, although there is a scientific consensus that it would not work. According to Axios, Donald Trump had already asked for a first time, in 2017, whether his administration should bomb hurricanes to prevent them from touching the ground. In this conversation, the president had not mentioned the possible use of nuclear bombs, said the site.
The White House did not want to comment on Axios' claims. "The goal" to stop the hurricanes "is not bad," said a senior administration official, under cover of anonymity, without confirming whether the remarks quoted by Axios had been made by the president. The United States is regularly hit by hurricanes. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey was the most powerful in 12 years to reach US territory.
Since then, the eastern coast of the United States has been hit by a series of catastrophic storms that have killed thousands of people and caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.