Texas Democrat Introduces Bill Banning Presidents From Nuking Hurricanes

A Democratic congresswoman from Texas has introduced legislation in the House of Representatives that would ban presidents and other federal officials from using nuclear weapons in order to change the weather.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Representative Sylvia Garcia said she introduced the bill in response to a report in August 2019 that President Donald Trump had asked about using nuclear bombs to fight off hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean.

Trump has since denied the report and called it “fake news.”

Garcia introduced the Climate Change and Hurricane Correlation and Strategy Act on June 1. If enacted, it would ban the president and other officials of the federal government from using “strategic weapons” and nuclear bombs from “altering weather patterns or addressing climate change.”

A statement on Garcia’s website said the bill also required the executive branch to report to Congress every five years on “how the United States plans to combat the increasing hurricane activity due to climate change.”

Garcia told the Washington Post that she realized other people have touted the use of nuclear weapons on hurricanes after she initially thought that Trump’s idea was “a really dumb idea.”

Experts have already said that using nukes in hurricanes would not have any effect on the storm.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration wrote on its website that nuking a hurricane was “not a good idea.”

“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,” NOAA wrote.

An Axios report in 2019 alleged that Trump had suggested nuking hurricanes during a hurricane briefing at the White House.

Trump reportedly asked, “Why don’t we nuke them?” The Axios source also reportedly said that Trump suggested dropping a bomb inside the eye of a hurricane to disrupt it as it started forming off the coast of Africa.

Axios also reported that a 2017 memo from the National Security Council detailed a second conversation where Trump asked if the administration should bomb hurricanes before they reached the U.S. mainland.

Trump has since denied that he ever suggested dropping nukes on storms. He has also called the article “fake news” in a tweet.

At the time, White House officials had declined to comment on the Axios report, saying, “We don’t comment on private discussions that the president may or may not have had with his national security team.”