Re: [geo] Axios: Trump suggested dropping nuclear bombs into hurricanes to stop them from hitting the U.S.

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 07:54:58 -0700

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

On 8/28/19 10:03 AM, Alan Robock wrote:

Dear Mike,


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:[email protected]
14 College Farm Roadhttp://people.envsci.rutgers.edu/robock
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8551  USA      ☮http://twitter.com/AlanRobock
On 8/27/2019 10:37 PM, Michael MacCracken wrote:


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


On 8/27/19 4:20 PM, David Appell wrote:

Didn't Edward Teller go to Alaska to try to convince a small town to 
let him enlarge their harbor using nuclear bombs?



On Tue, Aug 27, 2019 at 1:17 PM Jim Fleming <[email protected] 
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:


    Fixing the Sky, p. 194: "In 1945 Julian Huxley, then head of
    UNESCO, spoke at Madison Square Garden about the possibilities
    of using nuclear weapons as “atomic dynamite” for “landscaping
    the Earth” or perhaps using them to change the climate by
    dissolving the polar ice cap."

    On Tue, Aug 27, 2019 at 3:09 PM Jessica Gurevitch
    <[email protected]
    <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:

        Hadn't heard this.....yes, this would indeed be
        geoengineering (of weather, with unintended climate
        consequences).....it just gets crazier and crazier.....


        
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        On Mon, Aug 26, 2019 at 1:35 AM Andrew Lockley
        <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
        wrote:

            Poster's note: obliquely relevant as MCB is potentially
            able to influence hurricanes

            Axios: Trump suggested dropping nuclear bombs into
            hurricanes to stop them from hitting the U.S..
            
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.

            Illustration of Trump pressing nuclear button
            Illustration: Lazaro Gamio/Axios

            President Trump has suggested multiple timesto 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
                <https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/C5c.html> 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
            
<https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/11/hurricanes-weather-history-nuclear-weapons/>
 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.


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