Trump 'suggested firing nuclear weapons at hurricanes' - what would happen if the US attempted it?

Hitting a hurricane with a nuclear weapon would not stop the storm, but would turn it into a brand new beast

(AFP/Getty Images)

Donald Trump has insisted that, despite reports to the contrary, he never asked about potentially using nuclear weapons to disrupt hurricanes.

But the news has nevertheless put the idea in the national spotlight — and led many to wonder what, exactly, would happen if a nuke was used in that way.

Perhaps predictably, scientists and commentators quickly claimed the idea is terrible, and would actually make things a whole lot worse.

Ryan Maue, a climate analyst and meteorologist, was among those to highlight just how awful the idea is.

“Detonating a nuclear bomb inside a hurricane would do nothing to disrupt the storm,” Mr Maue wrote on Twitter after the story, written by Axios broke.

What it would actually do, according to Mr Maue, is create a "radioactive hurricane”.

Mr Trump is, of course, not the first person to — allegedly — float the idea of destroying a hurricane in this way. But, he is definitely the highest profile figure to have reportedly considered it (and the only one to have access to America's nuclear codes).

Chris Landsea, the science operations officer at the National Hurricane Centre, once posted an explanation as to what might happen if someone nuked a hurricane.

Then a research meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Mr Landsea wrote that it would take a ton of energy, and humans simply don’t actually have that capacity.

“The main difficulty with using explosives to modify hurricanes is the amount of energy required,” Mr Landsea wrote then.

Roughly put: hurricanes get their energy from warm ocean water, and from water vapour condensing into droplets. The heat released from condensation then warms the air, which leads to more seawater evaporation, followed by more condensation, and the cycle continuing.

That process, in a fully developed hurricane, releases 50 or more terawatts of heat energy at any given moment, according to Mr Landsea. Only about 1 per cent of that energy is then converted into wind.

The heat release “is equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes” Mr Landsea wrote.

In a single year, for comparison, the entire human population use about a third of the energy present during an average hurricane.

Plus, to Mr Maue’s concern, a nuclear hurricane would be much worse for the world than a regular hurricane. In that scenario, radiation would get caught up in trade winds and eventually reach land.