Bypass the Strait of Hormuz with nuclear explosives? The U.S. studied that option in the 1960s

The following essay is reproduced with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.

As the world struggles to move its oil supplies from the Middle East, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich raised eyebrows by posting on social media a radical idea: using nuclear bombs to open a new canal along a route that would avoid Iranian threats in the Strait of Hormuz.

Gingrich’s March 15, 2026 post linked to an article that claimed to be satire. Gingrich did not say whether his support was serious. But he’s old enough to remember when ideas like this were not only taken seriously, but actually pursued by the American and Soviet governments.

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As I explain in my book “Deep Cut: Science, Power, and the Unbuilt Interoceanic Canal,” the American version of this project ended in 1977. At the time, Gingrich was beginning his political career after working as a history and environmental studies professor.

Improving global trade and geopolitical influence

The idea of ​​a new canal to transport Middle Eastern oil had emerged two decades earlier, in the context of another Middle Eastern conflict, the Suez Crisis. In 1956, Egypt seized the Suez Canal from British and French control. The prolonged canal closure has driven up prices of oil, tea and other raw materials for European consumers, who depended on the shipping shortcut for goods from Asia.

But what if nuclear energy could be harnessed to open an alternative channel through “friendly territory”? That was the question posed by Edward Teller, the principal architect of the hydrogen bomb, and his fellow physicists at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Livermore, California.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration had already begun promoting atomic energy to produce electricity and power submarines. After the Suez Crisis, the U.S. government expanded its plans to harness “atoms for peace.”

Proponents of Project Plowshare, led by Teller, sought to use what they called “peaceful nuclear explosions” to reduce the costs of large-scale earthmoving projects and promote national security. They imagined a world in which nuclear explosives could help extract natural gas from underground reservoirs and build new canals, ports and roads on mountainsides, with minimal radioactive effects.

To launch the program, Teller wanted to create an instant port by burying and then detonating five thermonuclear bombs in a Native village on the northwest coast of Alaska. The plan, known as Project Chariot, sparked intense debate, as well as a pioneering environmental study of Arctic food webs.

Teller and Livermore physicists also worked with the Army Corps of Engineers to study the possibility of using nuclear explosions to build another waterway in Panama. Fearing that the aging Panama Canal and its narrow locks would soon become obsolete, U.S. officials had called for the construction of a wider, deeper canal that would require no locks to move ships on and off along its route.

A canal at sea level would not only be suitable for larger ships; it would also be simpler to use than the lock-based system, which required thousands of employees. Since the early 1900s, American canal workers and their families lived in the Canal Zone, a large swath of land surrounding the waterway. Panamanians were increasingly unhappy to see their country divided in two by a colony-like racially segregated zone.

Crossing Central America

Nuclear explosions seemed to make building a new canal at sea level financially feasible. The biggest push for the so-called Panatomic Canal came in January 1964, when violent anti-American protests broke out in Panama. President Lyndon B. Johnson responded to the crisis by agreeing to negotiate new political agreements with Panama.

Johnson appointed the Atlantic-Pacific Interoceanic Canal Study Commission to determine the best site to use nuclear explosions to blow up a shipping route between the two oceans. Funded by a Congressional appropriation of $17.5 million – the equivalent of about $185 million today – the five civil commissioners focused on two routes: one in eastern Panama and the other in western Colombia.

The Panamanian route passed through the forested river valleys of the Darién Isthmus and reached 1,100 feet in elevation. To search this landscape, engineers proposed setting off 294 nuclear explosives along the route, in 14 separate detonations, using the explosive equivalent of 166.4 million tons of TNT.

This was a staggering amount of energy: the most powerful nuclear weapon ever tested, the Soviet “Tsar Bomba” explosion in 1961, released the energy equivalent of 50 million tons of TNT.

To avoid radioactivity and ground shock, planners estimated that around 30,000 people, half of whom were indigenous, would need to be evacuated and resettled. The canal commission considered this a formidable, but not impossible, obstacle, writing in its final report: “Problems of public acceptance of the digging of a nuclear canal could probably be resolved through diplomacy, public education, and compensatory payments.” »

Not such a hot idea, in retrospect

As I explain in my book, marine biologists and evolutionists in the late 1960s sought to study the less obvious environmental effects of the project. Among other potential disasters, scientists warned that a sea-level canal could trigger “mutual invasions of Atlantic and Pacific organisms” by joining the oceans on either side of the isthmus for the first time in 3 million years.

Nuclear waterway projects ended in the early 1970s, not because of concerns about marine invasive species, but rather because of other complex issues. These included the difficulties of testing nuclear explosions for peaceful purposes without violating the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 and the huge budget deficits caused by the Vietnam War.

Despite geopolitical and financial constraints, sea-level channel studies have employed hundreds of researchers who have increased knowledge about the isthmus and its human and non-human inhabitants. Ironically, the studies found that wet clay rocks along the Darién route meant that nuclear explosives might not work properly there.

But for Project Plowshare’s biggest supporters, atomic excavation remained a worthy goal. In 1970, in their final report, the canal commissioners predicted that “one day nuclear explosions will be used in a wide variety of massive earthworks projects.” Teller shared their commitment, as he explained near the end of his life in the 2000 documentary “Nuclear Dynamite.”

Today, with widespread awareness of the serious environmental and health effects of radioactive fallout, it is difficult to imagine a time when using nuclear bombs to build canals seemed reasonable. Even before Gingrich’s post sparked ridicule, news articles described the Plowshare project using words like “wacky,” “crazy,” and “crazy.”

However, as societies grapple with disruptive new technologies such as generative AI and cryptocurrency, it is worth remembering that many of the ideas that ended up being discredited seemed not only reasonable but inevitable.

As historians of science and technology point out, technological and scientific developments cannot be separated from their cultural contexts. Moreover, technologies that become part of people’s daily lives often do so not because they are inherently superior, but because powerful interests defend them.

I wonder: which of the high-tech trends promoted today by influencers will amuse, shock and horrify our descendants?

This article was originally published on The conversation. Read the original article.