"Bypass the Strait of Hormuz with nuclear explosives? The US studied that in Panama and Colombia in the 1960s"

The Gingrich story dropped out of one of the feedreaders in mid-March and my first thought was "How very Soviet."*

From The Conversation, April 2:

With the world struggling to get oil supplies moving from the Middle East, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich raised eyebrows with a social media post highlighting a radical idea: Use nuclear bombs to cut a new channel along a route that would avoid Iranian threats in the Strait of Hormuz.

Gingrich’s March 15, 2026, post linked to an article that labeled itself as satire. Gingrich has not clarified whether his endorsement was serious. But he is old enough to remember when ideas like this were not only taken seriously but actually pursued by the U.S. and Soviet governments.

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

Improving global trade and geopolitical influence 
The idea for a new canal to move oil from the Middle East had emerged two decades earlier, in the context of another Middle East conflict, the Suez crisis. In 1956, Egypt seized the Suez Canal from British and French control. The canal’s prolonged closure caused the price of oil, tea and other commodities to spike for European consumers, who depended on the shipping shortcut for goods from Asia.

But what if nuclear energy could be harnessed to cut an alternative canal through “friendly territory”? That was the question asked 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 generate electricity and to power submarines. After the Suez crisis, the U.S. government expanded plans to harness “atoms for peace.” 

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

To kick-start the program, Teller wanted to create an instant harbor by burying, and then detonating, five thermonuclear bombs in an Indigenous village in coastal northwestern Alaska. The plan, known as Project Chariot, generated intense debate, as well as a pioneering environmental study of Arctic food webs.

Teller and the 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 be rendered obsolete, U.S. officials had called for building a wider, deeper channel that wouldn’t require any locks to raise and lower the ships along its route.....

....MUCH MORE 

Much less exciting via al-Arabiya, April 2:

"Gulf states considering new pipelines to avoid Strait of Hormuz: Report"  

*And the communists? As noted introducing June 2020's Big Time Logistics: "Novatek orders the world’s largest floating LNG storage unit for transshipment of Arctic gas"

There's something almost Soviet about the size of these infrastructure investments:

"Boris, do you really think you can reverse the flow of the giant rivers that flow to the Arctic?"
"Da"
[didn't happen, lot of planning, little action]

"Boris, are you really going to create reservoirs with nuclear explosions?"
"Da"
[happened*]

*****

*From Knowledge Stew:

....The USSR’s PNE Program

The USSR conducted 124 PNEs from 1965 to 1989. Their program was called Peaceful Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy and was also known as Project 7. The first PNE was conducted by the USSR in 1965 and was also the largest PNE by either country.

The site was at the Chagan nuclear test site in Kazakhstan and was 140 kilotons. By comparison, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 15 kilotons. The Soviets wanted to know if it was possible to create an artificial reservoir using a PNE. They placed the nuclear device deep in the ground under a dry portion of the Chagan River, and the blast made a crater 100 meters deep (328 feet) and 400 meters across (1,312 feet). The lip height of the newly formed crated was between 20 and 38 meters (65 to 124 feet). Some nuclear material was detected over Japan, and since the test happened before the Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty, the United States questioned whether the USSR had violated the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963.

The crater became a lake because of a channel that had been carved to the area before the test had taken place, but the radioactive levels of the water in the newly formed lake were found to be almost 100 times that of standard water levels more than 25 years later. That is why the reservoir has sometimes been dubbed, the “Atomic Lake.”....MUCH MORE 

And Stalin's dream of nuclear powered trains. Here's one version of the story:

Forgotten Russian projects 1950-60: a panorama from the cockpit of a nuclear locomotive and a flying ekranoplan with a hovercraft effect.

And a couple others that have slipped my mind but yeah, very Soviet, Comrade Gingrich.