I know that it wouldn’t work, but I’d really like to know how to *explain* to people that it wouldn’t.
In: Physics
As big as nukes are, they are still piddly amounts of energy compared to a hurricane.
To manipulate weather, you need to apply energy in a way that disrupts the problematic weather system, but we simply cannot generate enough energy to do much, even with nukes.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has this on their [FAQ page](https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/C5c.html)
The full FAQ page is [here](https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/tcfaqC.html).
The side effects is the real reason not to try it. The fallout would follow the storm path towards the land that you are trying to protect.
But aside from that, hurricanes are too big. We’d have to detonate a very large amount of nuclear weapons to have any impact.
1.) Hurricanes are enormous. It would be equivalent to launching a firework into a tornado. It wouldn’t do much of anything– might look cool though!
2.) The nuclear waste would be spread along the path of the unaffected hurricane causing far more damage than the hurricane would alone.
Tldr: the size/amount of nukes required would produce enough fallout the make life in the islands and coastal regions in the gulf of Mexico unlivable
Hurricanes are big, with hundreds of times more energy than a nuke spread over a large distance. A nuke wouldn’t be powerful enough to disrupt this energy.
Some even think it might just make the hurricane even more powerful, as storms are typically empowered by strong updrafts, something a nuke is gonna do well while also putting a lot of energy into the system.
Even if it did work, we probably still wouldn’t do it for one reason, nuclear fallout. You’d probably have to use a nuke on average at least once a year, likely all in a particular region of the ocean. It’s also hard to predict hurricanes when they’re still in the middle of the ocean, so the time to take action might also be when it’s right over an inhabited island. Either way that’s a lot of radioactivity in the ocean, which can damage what’s living there.
I mean, you could take chemotherapy if you get tired of shaving your head. You might get the desired result, but at the cost of other problems.
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