Hazel vs. Harvey, Hydrogen Bomb Theories, and What the Science Really Shows

I’ll be 80 years old next June if I make it that far, and in that time I’ve been through four major hurricanes: two “near-super” storms (Diane and Agnes), one classic Category 4 hurricane (Hazel), and one modern monster that I consider in a category all its own: Hurricane Harvey. Having lived through them personally, I can say with confidence that Harvey was the worst of the four—and the difference isn’t just in my imagination.

Hazel (1954) was a violent, destructive storm, especially from the Carolinas all the way into western Pennsylvania. It caused enormous treefall because it moved fast—nearly 50 mph at times—while the trees were still fully leafed out. Hazel was powerful, but because it blasted inland at high speed, the period of peak winds was short. There was no extended “howling” wind or the kind of atmospheric pandemonium people associate with modern hurricanes.

Diane (1955) and Agnes (1972) were historic storms in their own right, but for a different reason. They were primarily rain events—catastrophic flooding without the overwhelming wind component. Both storms produced massive flood disasters, but neither one brought the screaming, pulsing, resonant wind roar that people in South Texas heard during Harvey.

Harvey (2017), on the other hand, was in a class of its own. It hit as a strong Category 4 hurricane, but the real trouble began after landfall. Harvey stalled over Texas, maintained an unusually tight circulation, ran multiple eyewall replacement cycles inland, and pounded the same areas with wave after wave of intense wind bands. The sound of Harvey was unlike anything I had ever heard in 80 years—deep, resonant, violent, and continuous. People all over Victoria, Cuero, Goliad, and Rockport described it the same way: “It sounded alive.” Hazel never produced that acoustic level of chaos because Hazel never sat still long enough.

The difference is simple physics. Hazel moved so fast that its wind field never had time to resonate or cycle the way Harvey did. Harvey stayed in one place, churning, grinding, and amplifying its own turbulence. Harvey is one of the best examples of how slow-moving, tightly organized storms can produce far more terrifying wind effects than faster-moving storms that may actually be stronger on paper.

Back around 1970, I had a physicist neighbor who believed that Hazel had been caused by Soviet atmospheric testing of hydrogen bombs. That idea was actually fairly common among scientists in the 1960s and 1970s, when megaton-class weapons were still new and poorly understood. Many intelligent people wondered whether large nuclear tests could influence global weather or even generate storms.

We now know the answer: no, they can’t. A hydrogen bomb releases enormous energy, but only over a tiny volume of air. None of that energy meaningfully couples into the lower atmosphere, and absolutely none of it heats the ocean in any significant way. Hurricanes are powered by tens of thousands of cubic miles of warm ocean water. Even the largest nuclear weapons ever built do not alter ocean heat content; therefore, they cannot create or intensify hurricanes.

Hazel behaved exactly like a natural late-season hurricane. It formed from a tropical wave, strengthened over warm Caribbean water, and accelerated inland due to a mid-latitude trough. Nothing about it reflects artificial origins. The same physics that disproves the hydrogen-bomb theory also puts a dent in many modern “anthropogenic climate change creates super-hurricanes” arguments. The atmospheric machinery of hurricanes is simply too big, too ocean-driven, and too energy-intensive to be significantly altered by either nuclear weapons or minor human influences like CO₂ levels.

That doesn’t mean climate patterns never shift—it only means that neither Cold War atmospheric tests nor modern carbon politics can explain or control the kind of storm behavior seen in Hazel or Harvey. Nature runs these engines on scales of energy far beyond anything human beings can generate or alter. Harvey was worse than Hazel because Harvey stalled and fed off warm Gulf waters for days, not because of politics or bombs.

Bottom line: having lived long enough to see all four storms up close, I can say that Harvey was objectively the worst. The Cold War theories about hydrogen bombs influencing hurricanes were incorrect, and the same physical reasoning applies to modern claims about human-driven climate effects. Hurricanes are heat engines powered by warm oceans—not nuclear tests, and not CO₂ charts.