Could the military save civilians from hurricanes by blasting the storm with a NUCLEAR BOMB?
Experts discuss the possibility of using humanity's most destructive weapons to blunt the power of Mother Nature's fury
THE SIGHT of hurricanes tearing up towns and cities is enough to cause panic in even the calmest person.
But some people are so terrified of these devastating mega storms that they have called for them to be NUKED.
The 'nuke a hurricane' theory has refused to die ever since the weapons were first used at the end of the Second World War.
Even Francis W. Riechelderfer, then head of the U.S. Weather Bureau, imagined in 1961 “the possibility someday of exploding a nuclear bomb on a hurricane far at sea".
Now have discovered that Jack W Reed, a meteorologist at Sandia Laboratory, wrote a detailed report in 1995 proposing that a submarine could travel underwater to penetrate the eye of a hurricane and launch a missile.
This explosion would loft the relatively warm air above the storm into the stratosphere, weakening the storm and reducing the wind speed as the warm air is replaced by a colder air.
that a 20 megaton explosion could slow a storm with 100-knot peak winds to 50 knots.
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There were no takers for his idea because the consensus among authorities is that using a nuke to stop a hurricane would be a really, really BAD idea.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA): "Apart from the fact that this might not even alter the storm, this approach neglects the problem that the released radioactive fallout would fairly quickly move with the tradewinds to affect land areas and cause devastating environmental problems.
"Needless to say, this is not a good idea."
International law bans 'nuking a hurricane' and fighting mother nature with the destructive weapons.
The , signed and ratified by the United States in 1990, limits the yield of weapons for non-military purposes to 150 kiloton.
Hurricane Matthew, the most powerful Atlantic storm since 2007, caused devastation in October killing more than 1,000 people after rampaging through the Caribbean and the United States.
What is a hurricane?
Hurricanes, known as 'tropical cyclones', are the most violent storms on Earth.
They are like giant engines that use warm, moist air as fuel.
This is why they form only over warm ocean waters near the equator.
The warm, moist air over the ocean rises upward from near the surface.
As the warm air continues to rise, the surrounding air swirls in to take its place. As the warmed, moist air rises and cools off, the water in the air forms clouds. The whole system of clouds and wind spins and grows, fed by the ocean's heat and water evaporating from the surface.
As the storm system rotates faster and faster, an eye forms in the centre.
It is very calm and clear in the eye, with very low air pressure. Higher pressure air from above flows down into the eye.
When the winds in the rotating storm reach 39 mph, the storm is called a "tropical storm."
And when the wind speeds reach 74 mph, the storm is officially a "tropical cyclone," or hurricane.
Source NASA
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