Name: What If We Nuked A Hurricane?
Uploaded: 2021-01-04T20:20:16.000Z
Duration: 3 min 53 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Reporter: Dropping a nuclear bomb inside a hurricane.

Reporter: The president suggested bombing a hurricane

Briefers reportedly told the president, quote,

Narrator: Believe it or not, President Donald Trump

isn't the first person to suggest we nuke a hurricane.

Back in the '50s, a meteorologist named Jack Reed

introduced the idea as a way to prevent hurricanes

Narrator: And people have been asking why

In fact, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

it has a web page dedicated to answering just that.

Alex Wellerstein: So, if you set off a nuclear weapon

in a hurricane, not only do we still have a hurricane,

Narrator: For perspective, a hurricane can generate

the same amount of energy throughout its lifetime

Hurricane Irma measured 420 miles across.

That's 70 times as large as the blast zone for "Little Boy,"

So, detonating an atomic bomb inside a hurricane

is sort of like poking a rhino with a stick

and expecting it to just get out of your way.

And so the area that you set the weapon off

becomes highly radioactive and contaminated.

what if that somehow stays in the hurricane

and moves as the hurricane, say, makes landfall?

Narrator: In a worst-case scenario, winds from the hurricane

would quickly distribute the radiation throughout

Basically turning it from a massive storm with wind and rain

into a massive storm with radioactive wind and rain

that's 10 times larger and millions of times more powerful

In 2012, Hurricane Sandy traveled over 2,000 miles

from the Caribbean Sea up the US East Coast

what nuclear fallout does to an ocean and people nearby.

Wellerstein: It was in 1954, the United States set off

a very large thermonuclear weapon in the Marshall Islands,

and it contaminated a lot of fish in the area.

Japan ended up having a moratorium on fish consumption

And you could detect the radioactivity in fish

Narrator: Plus, scientists estimated that 55%

of all cancers in those living closest to the bomb site

might be attributed to the bomb's nuclear fallout.

So, if we had nuked, say, Hurricane Sandy,

not only would there have been the $65 billion

but who knows how much more it would have cost in

the additional damage to fishing industries, healthcare,

and even the simplest things you might not think about.

Wellerstein: Because you can't just rebuild the house.

and rebuild it from scratch if you want people to be able

to live there without increasing the cancer risk.

Narrator: Suffice it to say, nuking a hurricane,

Wellerstein: It's less of a sort of doomsday scenario