President Donald Trump's lack of knowledge about science prompted another embarrassing moment when the U.S. president said that we should simply "nuke hurricanes" to solve the problem.
Another hurricane is headed toward Puerto Rico this week. The island is still recovering from being hit twice in 2017. Trump's solution, however, wasn't entirely thought out, however, Axios reported Sunday.
"I got it. I got it. Why don't we nuke them?" Trump said during a hurricane briefing at the White House, sources said. "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 it disrupts it. Why can't we do that?"
The source admitted to paraphrasing the statements from the president.
"Sir, we'll look into that," responded the briefer to the president.
Trump reportedly then asked how many hurricanes the United States could take as if the country was a ship floating in the oceans.
The person briefing "was knocked back on his heels," according to the source in the room. "You could hear a gnat fart in that meeting. People were astonished. After the meeting ended, we thought, 'What the f*ck? What do we do with this?'"
Dropping a nuclear bomb would not only send nuclear material into the air, but it would also send it around the world through wind currents. It would also kill any fish or wildlife in the area and further pollute the ocean with nuclear material. If it was done over the Gulf of Mexico, it could make the entire area hazardous.
This wasn't the first time the president brought it up either. Axios reported that Trump raised the question to a senior administration official and it ended up in a National Security Council memo in 2017. Trump asked whether they could bomb hurricanes, but a source said that the NSC memo didn't say Trump called it a "nuclear" bomb.
The source said the president brought up "multiple topics, not just hurricanes. … It wasn't that somebody was so terrified of the bombing idea that they wrote it down. They just captured the president's comments."
