- Declassified memos revealed an American plan from 1963 to build a canal alternative to the Suez Canal.
- Nuclear bombs could have dug up more than 160 miles of Israel’s Negev Desert.
- The Suez Canal is currently blocked by a cargo ship stuck in the canal
According to a report, the US considered using 520 nuclear weapons to create an alternative to the Suez Canal through Israel in the 1960s. declassified memorandum.
It never happened, but an alternative to the Suez Canal would have been helpful in March 2021 when a cargo vessel was due to dock. The narrow pathThe blockage of one of the world’s most vital shipping lanes.
According to a 1963 memo, which was classified in 1996, 520 nuclear weapons would have been used to create the waterway. The memo called for “use of nuclear explosions for excavation Dead Sea Canal across the Negev Desert.”
On Twitter, Alex Wellerstein described the plan as a “modest proposition for the Suez Canal Situation” on March 24, 2021.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a US Department of Energy funded laboratory.
The article suggested that “a 160-mile long sea-level channel across Israel would be an interesting application of nuclear excavation.”
The memo stated that conventional methods of digging would be “prohibitively costly”. The memo said that “it appears that nuclear explosions could be applied profitably to this situation.”
The memo stated that “such canal would be a strategic valuable alternative to the current Suez Canal, and would likely contribute greatly to economic growth.”
Wellerstein calculated “520 nukes” (or 1.04 gigatons) of explosives as part of a pricing model. Tweet this.
A possible route proposed in the memorandum would have connected the Mediterranean to Gulf of Aqaba via the Negev desert of Israel, allowing access to the Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and Indian Ocean.
The laboratory stated that there are 130 miles “of virtually unpopulated desert wasteland and are therefore amenable nuclear excavation methods.”
According to the memo, the “crude preliminary investigations” indicated that the use of bombs to build a canal in Israel “appears within the ranges of technological feasibility”.
The memo, however, envisioned that one issue, which the authors hadn’t taken into account, could be “political viability, as it is probable that the Arab countries around Israel would strongly oppose the construction of a such canal.”
The memo was sent at a time when the US Atomic Energy Commission investigated using “peaceful nucleonic explosions” to dig useful infrastructure. Forbes published a report in 2018. Forbes reported that there were plans to dig a canal using this method in Central America.
The PNE project was left as an experimental one, even though the US determined that 27 PNE experiments had irradiated a large area. In 1974 the Atomic Energy Commission, too, was abolished.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is still around. According to its webpage You can find out more about this website atIt is committed to “ensuring safety, security, and reliability of our nation’s nuclear weapons deterrent.”
It was only a few years after the 1963 memorandum that it had been released. Suez crisisConflict for control of strategic waterway, which was a major event during the Cold War.
