Using nuclear explosives to bypass the Strait of Hormuz isn’t a novel idea for the U.S.

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. Instead of fighting over a 21-mile-wide bottleneck forever, we cut a new channel through friendly territory. A dozen thermonuclear detonations and you’ve got a waterway wider than the Panama Canal, deeper than the Suez, and safe from Iranian attacks. https://t.co/Et21kHCiAw — Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) March 15, 2026 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 generat