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Is China shooting us with a 'Hurricane Gun'? Trump repeatedly asked

NEW DELHIUpdated: May 11, 2022, 10:54 AM IST
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Former US President Donald Trump Photograph:(Reuters)

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Donald Trump had a serious concern for his national-security advisors and administration officials near the start of his presidency: Does China have the secret capability — even a weapon — to create massive, man-made hurricanes and then fire them at the United States?

Former US President Donald Trump regularly asked White House national security officials if China possessed a "hurricane gun" that could fire damaging man-made storms at the US, according to Rolling Stone magazine.

According to three unnamed former officials, the one-term president asked to know if such a weapon constituted an act of war and whether his military could react against the nuclear power.

"It was almost too stupid for words," one source told the magazine, which said that the person was "intimately familiar" with Trump’s questioning.

"I did not get the sense he was joking at all," the source added.

While in the White House, Trump seemed to have a strong personal interest in storms, suggesting that the military should bomb hurricanes before they hit land.

Watch | Former US President Donald Trump's supporters accused of intimidation in the 2020 elections

According to Axios, in 2019, the then-president inquired about the storms' threat to the US mainland with national security and homeland security agencies.

In the Oval Office, Trump discussed Hurricane Dorian and stood alongside a National Hurricane Center map that seemed to have been tampered with using a black pen.

In an apparent attempt to back up a false assertion made by Trump earlier, the image was changed to show the hurricane's route striking Alabama.

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