At 09:43 AM 04/04/2003 -0500, John Kelsey wrote:
Weren't there some proposals for using very low-fallout bombs to break up
dangerous hurricanes that were forming? (I just don't have the background
in meteorology to have any intuition about whether or not this is
plausible; I know hurricanes have a whole lot of energy tied up in
temperature and humidity differences in different masses of air, so maybe
it could work.)
There probably were, but of course nuclear bomb designers and their agents
don't typically have enough knowledge of meteorology either.
I don't know if the academic meteorology field has enough knowledge _now_
to predict the effects of nukes on hurricanes, much less predict them
well enough to "stop" a hurricane, but they certainly didn't back when
the Atoms For Peace gang were first suggesting such things.
Certainly they don't know enough to justify the dangers of radioactive fallout,
and the people who used to do above-ground nuclear testing had the sense to
do it far out in the relatively uninhabited parts of the Pacific
rather than in the critical parts of hurricane country,
i.e. the Caribbean ocean not all that far away from _Cuba_.
Furthermore, when you have extremely large amounts of potential energy
in a chaotic system that has lots of inputs you can't control,
Google has a reasonable collection of "Weather Modification" sites.
According to the American Meteorological Society's
1992 policy statement on weather modification http://twm.co.nz/AMS_wxmod.html
"There is no generally accepted conceptual model for
modifying tropical disturbances.
Hurricane modification experiments of the 1950s and 1960s were
inconclusive.
Although strong interest continued into the 1970s,
no organized research effort was undertaken, and
few studies have been devoted to this subject for the past 20 years.
No sound physical hypotheses exist for the modification of tornadoes,
or of damaging winds in general, and no scientific experimentation
has been conducted. Experiments have been carried out to suppress
lightning
but have not yet yielded methods sufficiently developed for
application.
On the other hand, there does seem to be some active weather modification
for applications like reducing fog at airports.
A lot of these struck me as desparate attempts by the bomb designers to
find *something* useful to do with the damned things besides pray that
they sit in their silos, rusting, and are never, never used.
Yes, that's about right...
