When US President Donald Trump reportedly suggested his country's military should bomb hurricanes to stop them making landfall, the idea sounded more than a little familiar to Australian National University professor Paul Francis.
You see, for the past 10 years, Professor Francis has had his first-year physics students consider the possibility.
In more recent years, he's even involved Mr Trump in the role-playing exercise.
"We don't have lectures in our classes, so the students are all put in teams," Professor Francis said.
"Some will be experts on atom bombs, some will be experts on hurricanes, some will be experts on other things like that.
"They're each given a briefing paper and I tell them they're a bunch of experts convened by Donald Trump at great expense to work out whether this is a good idea or not.
"It's possibly unrealistic, the idea of Donald Trump calling on panels of experts to think about anything, but anyway."
For the record, Mr Trump has denied ever asking, "Why don't we nuke them?". He called an Axios article's claims that he raised the idea of bombing hurricanes in a meeting with his top national security and homeland security officials "ridiculous" and "fake news".
But what effect would nuking a hurricane actually have?
The answer, according to Professor Francis, is that it would be "about as effective as trying to stop an oil tanker with a pistol".
He said a hurricane typically had between 10,000 and 100,000 times more energy than the most powerful atom bomb in the United States' arsenal.
"Some of the students find, 'Well, if one atom bomb has 10,000 times too little energy, maybe we drop 10,000 atom bombs on [a hurricane] and that might in principle do it'," Professor Francis said.
"But I think most of them conclude that all you're going to get is probably a pissed off, slightly radioactive hurricane bearing down on you. It's probably not a good idea."
So, what could the solution to stopping hurricanes be?
"There has been some speculation," Professor Francis said.
"One possibility is actually to spread an oil slick over the water where it's going to form, if you know early enough.
"By the time the hurricane's got going, the oil slick could get churned up by the waves and it's too late.
"But if you can work out far enough in advance where a hurricane's going to form and spread oil over it, that would stop water evaporating and it's the water evaporating that actually powers the whole thing."
