@Builder,
Mr Trumps "thought" has a long history as a wacky idea since the early part of the post Hiroshima time.
We have this multinational Treaty called the PNET
Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty signed and ratified in 1990 by the US and most of the world nuclar "club" as agreeing members.
There were a number of wacky ideas like building hiiways with nukes, redigging th Panama Canal etc.
The days of wackiness began in the early 1960's when the US st off a small bomb in "Operation Sedan Chair" out in Nevada. It left us with a huge area of desert that became a barren wasteland because of alpha and beta contamination, and may have been involved in sprading some lung cancers among people out there including several of our celebrities (of course many of them smoked )
The science involved is a small reality that the Us Weather Bureau (Now NOAA) calculated that a cat 4 hurricane releases about the energy equivalent of a 10 megaton H bomb every 15 minutes . Include the amount of fallout that would be distributed from the hurricane holding the bomb in and youd have a nice mess down wind so we didnt go through with this from the getgo(Im younger than Mr Trump, Im not the president with all his science advisers, yet I know about this nuke wackiness period).
If you can find the report on the "Atoms for Peace" meetings held in the late 1950's some of the proposals were quite serious and equally scary.
Our president doesnt listen to anybody but his pet rabbit,Mr Fuzzy. There were scientists from NOAA and the USGS that could have downloaded some information of a counter nature but apparently he just let this one fly at a news conference .
I have soome personal information about Nevada Test Site where Georgeob can back me on this, we had (as a country) tried some of the silliest experiments with nuclear explosions at very small scales with the idea of doing "good" with the technology. We found, in general that we can reach needed the needed velocities and force to accomplish certain tasks without that annoying fallout. There are several sites at NTS in which we have these 3 mile by 1/2 mile "cigars " of contamination along the desert. All from some well intentioned but ignorant experiments in which we shoveled a lot of tax money down a nuke lined hole.
Quote: We'll probably never know
I believe either Sandia or Lawrence Livermore Labs modeled the whole thing in the early 90's and it came out badly on computer. We can do it again today just faster and with more inputs and sweeter colors(There also was an EU model(I recall) that corroborated these findings) I think they modeled a remotely powered submarine that would sail into the eye and all the safety catches would be turned off and it would detonate in the surface of the eye with the idea of moving so much air to quell the heat transfer. Safety concerns forbad a bomb drop from a drone or auto piloted plane because it couldnt be guaranteed to hit the target. So ICBM and plane drop options werent considered feasible.
As a guy who works in science its always good to try to read about who did what and when in the past before we go running off with conclusions.