Reporter: Dropping a nuclear bomb inside a hurricane.
Reporter: Drop a nuclear bomb on them.
Reporter: The president suggested bombing a hurricane
on multiple occasions.
Briefers reportedly told the president, quote,
"We'll look into that."
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
from reaching the coast.
Announcer: High- and low-pressure areas
are recorded hourly at each station.
Narrator: And people have been asking why
we don't nuke hurricanes ever since.
In fact, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
has been asked this question so much,
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,
now you have a radioactive hurricane.
So, that's not a positive development.
Narrator: For perspective, a hurricane can generate
the same amount of energy throughout its lifetime
as 10,000 nuclear bombs.
And the physical size of a hurricane
is a major issue as well.
Hurricane Irma measured 420 miles across.
That's 70 times as large as the blast zone for "Little Boy,"
the nuclear bomb dropped over Hiroshima.
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.
It's not gonna happen.
Oh, and then there's the issue of
highly radioactive nuclear fallout.
Wellerstein: Best-case scenario
is that it rains out very quickly.
And so the area that you set the weapon off
becomes highly radioactive and contaminated.
That's your best-case scenario.
A more worse-case scenario is
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
the entire storm.
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
than any nuclear bomb in history.
Not to mention, hurricanes move fast.
In 2012, Hurricane Sandy traveled over 2,000 miles
from the Caribbean Sea up the US East Coast
in just 10 days.
And we know from past experience
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
for some time as a result of this.
And you could detect the radioactivity in fish
for thousands of miles.
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
in damage repair,
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.
Now you've also got to remove, you know,
several inches of topsoil
and destroy the original material
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,
as NOAA puts it, is "not a good idea."
Wellerstein: It's less of a sort of doomsday scenario
as it is just a, like, really bad idea.
No-benefit scenario.