Hurricanes are devastating forces that can cause millions in damage and take many lives. Many people have tried to come up with a way to stop these monsters from making it to land or even forming in the first place. Though no idea has been quite as popular or as impressively enduring, as the idea to “nuke” the storm back into nothing.
You may have heard people recently bringing this idea up in the aftermath of Harvey, which parts of the southern coastal US are still reeling from. And in fact after Katrina the idea was brought up often among military and science fans. But the concept is much older than you think; we’ve fantasized about blowing up hurricanes since the sixties, when Jack W. Reed, an Air Force vet and meteorologist came up with the concept as part of Project Plowshare, a U.S. Military project dedicated to use weapons of war for peaceful civilian purposes, yes including nuclear weapons.
Reed’s plan was to weaken the storms or change their trajectory by detonating nuclear bombs in the air in front of the storms, changing the temperature and making the storms move in another direction.
“It seems such a burst would, for at least 15 minutes, greatly influence the horizontal circulation of a hurricane. Of Course, it would be adding to the total horizon convergence in the storm, but if a burst were made on one side of a storm or two bursts on opposite sides of a storm, considerable asymmetry in circulation could result”
But Reed’s real goal was to detonate a warhead in the eye of the storm:
“A most promising new approach to storm destruction is suggested by recent observations of the temperature structure of a hurricane. These show that the eye is nearly 10 °C warmer than the surrounding storm at 20,000 feet above sea level. It appears that a megaton explosion in the eye would engulf and entrain a large quantity of this hot “eye” air and carry it out of the storm into the stratosphere. It may be proved more economical to remove air with several smaller shots depending on the cost of devices.”
Of course you may think this sounds crazy, or awesome or even crazily awesome. But the science isn’t on Reed’s side as it turns out. A big issue with using bombs to stop a hurricane is that it requires massive amounts of energy to disrupt a storm front as powerful as a tropical cyclone. A hurricane gets its energy from warm ocean water condensing into rain droplets. The heat released during condensation serves to continue to warm the surrounding air, which causes more seawater to evaporate, condense, and continue the cycle.
A fully developed hurricane releases 50 or more terawatts of heat energy at any given moment, only about 1 percent of which is converted into wind. The heat release is equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes. The entire human race in 2011 used about a third of the energy present in an average hurricane. In other words the power we could bring against a hurricane pales in comparison to the storm itself. And we run the added risk of increasing the power of the storm by adding MORE heat to the mix. We know that tropical storms rely on heat to power themselves.
You may ask yourself then “Why not nuke it before it becomes a hurricane?” Well, current estimates show that currently around 80 tropical storms form in the Atlantic every year, and of those, roughly five will become hurricanes that threaten people. There is currently no way to tell if a hurricane will develop from a tropical disturbance. And of course, tropical disturbances are themselves only a step away from a full blown hurricane, by adding the energy of a nuke we could manufacture a hurricane instead of stop one. And, worst of all, we would likely create a ‘Radioactive hurricane’, far worse than a normal hurricane this would spread fallout far and wide and contaminate everything it flew over.
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