‘Why don’t we nuke them?’ Trump has ‘repeatedly asked if he can drop nuclear bombs on HURRICANES to stop them before they hit US shores’
- Sources told Axios that Trump has been heard asking if bombs can be dropped on hurricanes while they’re traveling across the Atlantic Ocean
- The idea was to dissipate the storm before it hit the US coast
- People who heard the president’s question were said to have been flummoxed
- Trump is said to have asked about bombing hurricanes during meetings with Homeland Security and national security advisers
President Trump has reportedly asked Homeland Security and national security officials several times if nuclear bombs can be dropped on hurricanes to stop them from making landfall in the US.
Trump’s inquiries about nuking hurricanes was revealed by Axios sources who were either in the room when Trump made the queries or had been briefed on National Security Council memorandums that included the president’s words.
According to one of the sources who was attending an unspecified hurricane briefing with Trump at the White House, Trump responded to what he was told by saying: ‘I got it. I got it. Why don’t we nuke them?’
Sources have told Axios that President Trump (on August 21) has asked security officials multiple times whether bombs can be dropped on hurricanes to stop them from hitting the US
The source said that Trump had suggested dropping a bomb ‘inside the eye of the hurricane’ to disrupt it as it moves across the Atlantic Ocean, before it hits US shores.
The source said that the person who had been briefing Trump on the hurricane situation said something non-committal along the lines of ‘we’ll look into that’ option.
Trump then apparently asked how many hurricanes the United States would be able to withstand, before repeating his idea about stopping them before they hit land.
The source said the person doing the briefing was shocked.
‘You could hear a gnat fart in that meeting,’ the source told Axios. ‘People were astonished. After the meeting ended, we thought, “What the f**k? What do we do with this?”‘
Trump (on August 23) is said to have been hot on the hurricane bombing idea prior to when John Bolton became his National Security Adviser in April 2018
The National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration has said that nuking a hurricane is ‘not a good idea’ because it may not change the hurricane’s path and the radioactive fallout would hit American shores causing ‘devastating environmental problems’ (file images)
Although this particular hurricane briefing did not have a time period attached to it, Trump was supposedly known to have been hot on the hurricane bomb idea before John Bolton became his National Security Adviser in April 2018.
During a discussion with a senior administration official in 2017, which was logged by a NSC memo, Trump apparently asked if his administration could deploy bombs against hurricanes to stop them.
Both sources told Axios that the hurricane bombing idea floundered and never made it on the road to a formal policy process.
When asked to comment on the Trump hurricane bombing query reports, a White House official told the news site they had no comment on conversations that may or may not have occurred between the president and his national security team.
A second administration official apparently backed up Trump by noting that the president’s goal of keeping ‘a catastrophic hurricane from hitting the mainland’ wasn’t a bad thing.
It’s unclear where Trump might’ve found inspiration for the desire to use bombs against hurricanes, although it is a popular enough theory that the government’s own National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration has had to create a whole FAQ about it under the ‘Tropical Cyclones Myths’ category.
As the NOAA points out, dropping a nuclear bomb on a hurricane is ‘not a good idea’ seeing as how ‘this might not even alter the storm.’
But, more importantly, the organization says that ‘the released radioactive fallout would fairly quickly move with the tradewinds to affect land areas and cause devastating environmental problems.’
