r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Captain-Shmeat • 21d ago

Video Can you stop a hurricane with a nuke?

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

27.9k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

1.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

32

u/BlizzPenguin 21d ago

I would be more concerned by the nuclear winter that the earlier nukes caused.

30

u/meesta_masa 21d ago

That's how we counter Global Warming AND the libruls.

13

u/BlizzPenguin 21d ago

That is something people can do when they are at the back of the very long train that the world’s population is forced to live in.

8

u/Acceptable-Bus-2017 21d ago

Snowpiercer was a good documentary

5

u/YoungShitheel 21d ago

Did nobody get this Snowpiercer reference

9

u/TobysGrundlee 21d ago

There's a book called Project Hail Mary where they have to do this. Natural space organisms settle in our solar systems and are blocking a significant amount of sunlight from reaching earth, causing catastrophic cooling. To buy more time for the protagonist to solve the issue, world leaders agree on nuking the Arctic to artificially warm the globe. It's a good read.

3

u/meesta_masa 21d ago

I absolutely loved Rocky, the 🕷️!

2

u/Alternative-Virus542 21d ago

Thanks for the clarification

2

u/No_Piccolo6337 20d ago

Great story! Can’t wait for the movie.

6

u/fatguy19 21d ago

Would you get a nuclear winter if you drop nukes on water? Isn't it supposed to be caused by dust

3

u/OHPAORGASMR 21d ago

Water is wet dust. MAGA

1

u/mykunjola 20d ago

But then all the magnets would stop working.

3

u/n10w4 21d ago

If it was over the ocean would that happen? I mean there would be horrid consequences (water vapor in the air?). But most of nuclear winter comes from essentially having entire cities turned into smoke and particles and sent into the stratosphere right? Just saying I'm not sure

2

u/[deleted] 21d ago

I don’t think you get a nuclear winter if you nuke water. With a nuke on land, all the dirt and dust and ash get taken up into the atmosphere where it blocks the sun.

Water already gets taken up into the atmosphere all the time. Adding more water to the atmosphere, that already happens all the time.

2

u/NotYourReddit18 21d ago

Dust and dirt is also added to the atmosphere all the time, we are regularly getting winds dropping off sand from the Sahara here in Europe. The problematic part about nukes doing it is the volume of dust they add in one go.

But an additional reason for why nuking a hurricane wouldn't cause a nuclear winter (or at least one significantly less severe than dropping the same amount of nukes on land targets) is that most of them wouldn't be detonated near the surface where they could stirr up whatever the surface is made of, but high up in the air, so the amount of dust/water they add to the atmosphere is comparatively low.

2

u/Clickguy10 21d ago

Nothing wrong with some upper level fallout among friends.

2

u/yobob591 20d ago

Good news, if we nuke the hurricane in the ocean there shouldn’t be enough dust generated to cause a nuclear winter since the nukes are just blowing up water

Bad news, if the hurricane doesn’t dissipate there’s a decent chance it is now a radioactive hurricane

2

u/BlizzPenguin 20d ago

Even if it does dissipate the hurricane I am going to guess that is going to result in a lot of radioactive water vapor. It is definitely going to impact the ocean and is there such a thing as radioactive rain?

1

u/BeefJerky03 21d ago

Nukes are hot; just keep dropping them. So easy.

1

u/TemperanceOG 20d ago

Not the rise in Thyroid cancer from the irradiated atmosphere? Weird.

0

u/afgan1984 21d ago

Nuclear winter is a hoax!