Why you shouldn't nuke hurricanes

The article I have copied and pasted below is directly from the NY times “Interpreter” page.  There are other articles on the page, but I’m only reproducing this article because it deals with hurricanes, and at least one idea how to deal with them that I view as being in the “nutcase” category.

“Why you shouldn't nuke hurricanes”

Friday, September 8, 2017

NYTimes.com

Welcome to the Interpreter newsletter, by Max Fisher and Amanda Taub, who write a column by the same name.

On our minds: An unorthodox (and unwise) solution for major weather events and what it  says about how we weigh certain threats against others. Also, a single tweet sums up human knowledge on war (the war tweet is not reproduced by me in this post).

Pro Tip: Don’t Nuke Hurricanes

We all know the feeling of facing a problem we don’t know how to solve. However, take it from the climate and nuclear scientists who have investigated one particularly extreme solution to the problem of hurricanes: You cannot solve your problems by nuking them.

This hard fact of life is, oddly, more established among foreign-policy professionals than among weather watchers, who have so frequently suggested using nuclear weapons against the storms that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration felt compelled to issue a statement discouraging them.

“Needless to say, this is not a good idea,” says the statement, which is undated.

This idea has proved strangely resilient. It was addressed in 2005 by USA Today, which said that “many people” had shared the suggestion, and in 2012 by the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation. And, yes, this week, with one hurricane having just hit the United States and another on its way, people are tweeting about nuking them.

 

There are some obvious — or so we would’ve thought — reasons not to drop nuclear weapons on hurricanes. For one, depositing large amounts of nuclear radiation in strong, high-altitude winds would expose millions of people to what is effectively poison.

It would also violate a 1974 treaty that bans such nuclear detonations. It would devastate wildlife in the blast radius. It would weaken international norms against using nuclear weapons. It would risk being misread by other nuclear powers as an act of aggression. You get the idea.

But the most persuasive point may be that it wouldn’t work, though not for the reason you might think. Hurricanes are simply too powerful.

The heat released within a hurricane, according to the NOAA statement, “is equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes.” Only one-10th of that heat is converted into wind.

Altogether, the energy within a hurricane is equivalent to five times the amount of power used worldwide in 1990.

In megatons of TNT, the standard unit of measurement for bombs, the energy in a hurricane amounts to 1,000 megatons. The most powerful nuclear weapon ever build by the United States, so impractically large that it was scrapped decades ago, had a maximum yield of 25 megatons.

USA Today compared nuking a hurricane to throwing a ping-pong ball at a charging elephant. The NOAA said it “doesn't seem promising.”

We spend most of our time, as journalists, focused on human-made disasters, of which there are many in the world, and of which the most-discussed this summer has been North Korea’s nuclear threat to the United States.

So our bias is toward seeing such threats as paramount. But these numbers about the force of a hurricane have given us some perspective. North Korea’s latest nuclear test, its largest ever, detonated a device with an explosive power of 100 to 300 kilotons, or 0.1 to 0.3 megatons. That’s about 0.02 percent the power of a major hurricane.

North Korea’s nuclear tests have also so far killed zero people, whereas Hurricane Harvey has killed several dozen and left thousands homeless. As of this writing, we don’t know the full damage that Hurricane Irma will do, but millions in the Caribbean and the United States are at risk.

We’re not saying North Korea’s nuclear program can be shrugged off. It’s a big deal. But its risks are, so far, only potential. Hurricanes and the damage they do are an absolute certainty for the United States. And while we can’t turn off the weather, we can address the climate change that is thought to help fuel such storms.

As the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation wrote in its statement on the idea of nuking hurricanes, “Although a nuclear weapon of this size is capable of killing millions of people, it still pales in comparison to Mother Nature.”

 

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