Trump’s Reported ‘Sharknado’-Like Hurricane Plan Gets Reality Check From Film’s Writer

So perhaps the idea of bombing hurricanes is, yeah, not too fin-tastic.

According to a new report from Axios, President Donald Trump has “suggested multiple times” to senior homeland and national security officials that they should “explore using nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes from hitting the United States.”

It didn’t take long for people on Twitter to ask: Wait, isn’t that what happens in “Sharknado”?

The president subsequently denied he had suggested such a plan.

Axios responded that it stands by its reporting.

As early as 2013, the “Sharknado” movies used explosives to thwart deadly fish-based storm systems. So would the “Sharknado” strategy of launching bombs into storms work for real-life hurricanes?

“For the record, while small incendiary explosives may be effective against sharknadoes, nuclear weapons CANNOT snuff out the much larger hurricanes,” Thunder Levin, who wrote the first four “Sharknado” movies, told HuffPost. “They just make radioactive hurricanes, and red or blue, I’m sure we can all agree that would be worse.”

An article by Live Science from 2012 seems to support Levin’s assessment:

There’s also the possibility that bombing the hurricane, if it had any effect at all, would just add to the storm’s heat supply, making it even stronger.

The idea of nuking storms has actually been around since the Eisenhower era, according to Axios, and has come up enough over the years that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published an FAQ page denouncing it. 

Even in “Sharknado,” bombs can blow up in your face. In the first installment of the franchise, Ian Ziering’s character, Fin, breaks up the final storm using a car carrying a bomb; however, in “Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!,” explosions can’t do the trick. Instead, David Hasselhoff’s character is forced to deploy a giant space laser to stop a sharknado wall from destroying the East Coast, aka “Feast Coast.” 

It’s interesting that Trump’s name has come up in connection with a “Sharknado” plot point, considering he was reportedly originally slated to play the president in 2015′s “Sharknado 3.”

According to a Hollywood Reporter story, Trump had stalled signing his “Sharknado 3” contract while mulling over his real-life presidential run. The production team then went with Mark Cuban instead for “Sharknado” duties, much to the chagrin of the now-president.

In addition to taking a bite out of the supposed plan to blow up hurricanes, Levin also said he was sorry Trump didn’t make his “Sharknado” debut.

“The most scary thing about sharknadoes is that they seem to have foisted the Trump presidency on us,” Levin said. “Perhaps if we’d let him play the president in ‘Sharknado 3,’ instead of the far superior and more believable Cuban, he would have gotten it out of his system and we wouldn’t have to deal with him playing the president now. Since I was one of the strongest opponents to him getting the role — I simply didn’t think he’d be believable — I feel I must apologize to the world.”