Axios: ‘Trump Suggested Nuking Hurricanes To Keep Them From Hitting U.S.’

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?'”

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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.”

Really? You think so? If you’re wondering where Trump got this from, it’s an old conspiracy theory that has been debunked. Back in the Eisenhower era, the idea was explored that detonating a nuclear bomb over the eye of a hurricane could counteract convection currents. Now, the blatantly obvious downside is that the radioactive fallout would move with the tradewinds and create an even more devastating environmental problem than the hurricane, so the idea was abandoned early on. But Trump found out about it.

About 3 weeks after Trump’s 2016 election, National Geographic published 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.

You thought that Puerto Rico had problems before? There’s a hurricane forming which is headed it’s way next week and it’s still recovering from 2017 — and this is the kind of dialogue going on in the White House by way of remedying the situation.  And never lose sight of the fact that this anti-science moran is the one with the key to the nuclear codes. I don’t know if I can stop worrying and learn to love the bomb.