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.