The US had a plan in the 1960s to blast an alternative Suez Canal through Israel using 520 nuclear bombs
The US considered a proposal to use 520 nuclear bombs to carve out an alternative to the Suez Canal though Israel in the 1960s, according to a declassified memorandum.
Conventional methods of excavation would be "prohibitively expensive," the memo said. "It appears that nuclear explosives could be profitably applied to this situation."
One possible route the memorandum proposed stretched across the Negev desert in Israel, connecting the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Aqaba, opening access to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.
The laboratory noted that there were 130 miles of "virtually unpopulated desert wasteland, and are thus amenable to nuclear excavation methods."
But the memo conceived that one problem, which the authors had not taken into consideration, might be "political feasibility, as it is likely that the Arab countries surrounding Israel would strongly object to the construction of such a canal."
The memo came as the US Atomic Energy Commission was investigating using "peaceful nuclear explosions" to dig out useful infrastructure, Forbes reported in 2018. There were also plans to use this method to dig out a canal in Central America, Forbes reported.
