While overseas attending the G7 summit in Biarritz, France, President Trump fended off news from home that he had once floated the idea of using nuclear weapons in an attempt to neutralize hurricanes before they could reach land.
Axios broke the news Sunday in a story titled “Trump suggested nuking hurricanes to stop them from hitting U.S.”
The report cited sources “who have heard the president’s private remarks and been briefed on a National Security Council memorandum that recorded those comments,” and said that the president had brought the idea up “multiple times.”
“I got it. I got. Why don’t we nuke them?” one source paraphrases the president as saying during a briefing. “They start forming off the coast of Africa, as they’re moving across the Atlantic, we drop a bomb inside the eye of the hurricane and that disrupts it. Why can’t we do that?”
A briefer apparently told the president they would “look into that,” but was shocked at the suggestion.
The report says that the briefer “was knocked back on his heels,” and adds that “You could hear a gnat fart in that meeting. People were astonished. After the meeting ended, we thought, ‘What the f—? What do we do with this?'”
The White House responded to the report in the story, saying “We don’t comment on private discussions that the president may or may not have had with his national security team.”
One official reportedly wanted to emphasize that the president had good intentions.
“His goal — to keep a catastrophic hurricane from hitting the mainland — is not bad,” the official is reported to have said. “What people near the president do say is they say ‘I love a president who asks questions like that, who’s willing to ask tough questions.'”
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However, that apparently didn’t go far enough for Trump, because Monday morning he tweeted out a repudiation of Axios’s report.
“The story by Axios that President Trump wanted to blow up large hurricanes with nuclear weapons prior to reaching shore is ridiculous,” he tweeted. “I never said this. Just more FAKE NEWS.”
The reporters who broke the story have both said they stand by their reporting.
Margaret Talev replied with a tweet simply stating that “We stand by our reporting,” while her co-author, Jonathan Swan, went a bit more in-depth.
“I stand by every word in the story,” he wrote . “He said this in at least two meetings during the first year and a bit of the presidency, and one of the conversations was memorialized. Not to mention that we gave the White House press team full visibility of everything we were reporting nine hours before publication. We published their statement in the story.”
Trump wouldn’t be the first person to suggest using nuclear weapons to disrupt hurricanes before they make landfall.
In fact, the NOAA addresses the idea in an FAQ , noting that “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.”
h/t: Axios
