The mayor of Colleyville, Texas, Bobby Lindamood, made a perfectly reasonable suggestion that we should nuke Milton, after removing the radiation from the bomb, of course.
In a since-deleted Facebook post, Bobby Lindamood, the mayor of Colleyville (a Fort Worth suburb) wrote:
For the amount of destruction this next hurricane is brining, it’s time to throw a simi nu/ke bo//mb (minus the radiation) at this dude and see if we can stop the rotation. It may save more than it can hurt.He added,
Just casting thoughts and ideas. This is gonna be bad.
Spoilsport NOAA has thrown a wet blanket on that idea.
During each hurricane season, someone always asks “why don’t we destroy tropical cyclones by nuking them” or “can we use nuclear weapons to destroy a hurricane?” There always appear suggestions that one should simply nuke hurricanes to destroy the storms. 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.
I ask you, who do you want to listen to, some nerd in a lab coat or a proud MAGAt in a cowboy hat?
The big hat must cover a big brain.
I blame the endless succession of Hollywood action blockbusters which rely on the premise that there is no problem so big or complex that you can’t just nuke it.
@ ^ Dunc : I blame Trump, far as I’m aware he was the first fool to make that suggestion..
Source : https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-did-donald-trump-suggest-nuking-hurricanes-1535171
A nuclear bomb “minus the radiation”. LOL!
I guess if they believe in the god of the Pentateuch minus being a jerk and a bully …
A fuel air explosive would be the equivalent of a nuke without radiation. But ignoring the fact it wouldn’t work to stop a hurricane an FAE probably wouldn’t work in a hurricane. FAEs involve creating a large cloud of an explosive substance,. such as propane, then detonating it with another explosive. I doubt you could keep the cloud coherent enough in hurricane force wind long enough to properly detonate it.
billseymoure @ #3 — Which “god of the Pentateuch”? There are several…actually quite a few.
The idea of using explosives to disrupt a hurricane’s organization goes back a ways IIRC. But these fools don’t appreciate the amount of energy in even a small hurricane, much less a Cat 5 monster like Milton. Even several large explosions attempting to disrupt the storm’s organization would be a mere drop in the bucket.
@2 StevoR: Trump wasn’t the first. When I was a kid the science book in school explained that even ignoring the fall out, a nuke isn’t enough energy to matter to a hurricane. This sort of thing has been suggested from the start, when nukes were invented a bunch of idea for using them were suggested before the long term damage of radiation was understood.
The line about a 10 gallon hat on a 1 gallon head comes to mind.
Idiots like this are infesting the Republican Party, at all levels and in almost all states — and yet they’re still treated as a serious party. If even ONE high-profile Democrat had said anything this stupid, our “news” media would be all over it and the entire party would be mocked into oblivion for at least another generation. Hell, Mondale, Dukakis, Kerry, Gore and Hillary Clinton got sunk for saying things far less asinine than today’s Republican blitherings.
The hat covers the gaping hole.
The Pillars of Modern Conservatism; moral and intellectual bankruptcy. Just ask our own (Canadian) Peewee Poilievre.
Applying more energy to a highly energetic, heat-driven system sounds totally reasonable /s
“simi nu/ke bo//mb (minus the radiation)”
1. Lindamood is simi-literate.
2. What’s the deal with the slashes?
3. Minus the radiation is a dynamite idea.
C’mon, NOAA. He said remove the radiation first.
It’s just nuclear physics. How hard can it be?
I remember seeing a physics blog once that tackled an issue of Superman from the Silver Age when he blew out a hurricane. It’s been a long time but I believe they calculated that the necessary energy release in order to actually do that would be enough to blow a significant chunk of Earth’s atmosphere out into space.
I blame the uniformed, uneducated, ignorant American populus for allowing people like Mr. 10 Gallon to be put in any public office. This certainly can’t be the first senseless statement from this lowbrow politician.
hurricanes have a lot of power in them. a quick google responded with 6.0 x 10^14 Watts.
for a nuke, one megaton is equivalent to 4.18 × 10^15 joules. lets average out that energy over a second. then you get power output 4.18×10^15 watts.
thats like 10 times the power of the hurricane! seems like a nuke could do something to the hurricane.
however, the nuke is very local. hurricanes can have a radius of 100+ miles. plus the hurricane lasts for days, not a second.
a nuke is not gonna have a significant effect on a hurricane.
also, just where does does that asshat lindamood suggest the nuke be detonated? tampa? that might be a sub-optimal outcome for tampa…
This says that the average hurricane has the equivalent energy of about 10000 nuclear bombs. So a single nuke would not do much especially since Milton is not an average hurricane.
@12 larper: The slashes are probably some combination of trying to avoid any moderation algorithms that might latch on to a word like “bomb” and the general paranoia of rightwingers about the government listening in and coming for them if they use certain words. It goes right along with the rest of this guy’s intellect, which might best be described as 10 grams of brains in a 10 gallon hat.