The news of all this rainmaking in the West aroused intense interest on the part of a young man named Gordon Clouser. He thought he might be able to prevent hail, and if he succeeded, he might stop tornadoes. In the Midwest there is an old story about a farmer who knocked the life out of a tornado by hitting it with a two-by-four. On hearing this story, many people have gotten the idea that the government might destroy a tornado by gunfire. More recently there have been serious proposals that these vicious local storms with funnel clouds and violent winds be destroyed by guided missiles. There is no evidence that any of the plans offered so far would be successful in breaking up hailstorms or tornadoes, but they are extremely small when compared with hurricanes, and the government has received thousands of proposals that these great storms be wiped out or rendered harmless by gunfire.
Behind most of the suggestions for killing hurricanes is the idea that they begin as small whirls in the atmosphere and go through early stages of growth to the size of a tornado or a thunderstorm, and if they could be hit with great force in a vital place while small, they might die out. On this assumption, there have been a great many proposals that the Navy send battleships into the hurricane area to search for incipient hurricanes and fire broadsides into them. No test of this kind has been made for two reasons. The hurricane region is so large that the entire Navy would be insufficient for such a patrol. On the other hand, there is not a shred of evidence that hurricanes begin as small storms like tornadoes or thunderstorms. Actually, they seem to develop as mildly disturbed weather over an area of thousands of square miles. The experts say that shooting at the weather in such a large region would certainly be futile. After the World War II, the atom bomb stimulated some new ideas and thousands of letters were written to the government about knocking a hurricane out with an atom bomb at the right time and place.
When the New Mexico atom bomb was exploded, the weather was bad, with rain in torrents, strong winds, lightning and thunder. Afterward, the weather was much better and this led to a lot of speculation. The fact is, however, that the scientists waited until the weather improved before they exploded the bomb; hence neither the bad weather nor the improvement could be attributed to the explosion.