It never fails — a Republican leader always turns out to be an absolute idiot. Behold, Newt Gingrich’s plan for getting oil tankers past the Strait of Hormuz.
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.
Easy! Just nuke UAE and Oman put a chain of craters across them. Can you see any problems with that? Here’s a short summary.
Realistically, it would take three to five years to survey and map the canal, identify where to place the nuclear devices, prepare the route, and drill explosion wells. Add another one to two years for the actual detonations, blasting out millions of tons of sand and rock, and creating a trench 400 meters wide and 60 meters deep. Then it would take another five to ten years to complete the canal, including dredging, smoothing, lock construction, and the necessary “cool-down” period.
So, not an instant solution to the current crisis.
But even if feasible, it’s not practical. The experiments conducted nearly 70 years ago by the Americans and Soviets found that the fallout and radiation released into the atmosphere by even a few nuclear devices negated the time benefits. Moreover, the immediate zone – the canal being built – would remain so radioactive that it would make the passageway too dangerous to transit for decades.
Would that still be friendly territory after that kind of treatment?
ugh i can’t believe this vile so-and-so is still among us.
why would any decent human be willing to take advice from the guy who divorced TWO wives when they got sick?
Newt Gingrich is still alive?
For some reason I thought he’d died years ago. Guess that was just wishful thinking.
If you are going to go to that effort, why not lay down an oil pipeline through that proposed canal route?
Pump the oil out above the Strait of Hormuz, pump it through the pipeline that bypasses the Strait, and load up oil tankers nearer the Indian ocean.
Pipelines are well established technology and they are everywhere.
So, I am shrieking.
This is the guy who single-handedly destroyed the tradition of “civility” in government and politics, and who brought us the current era of vicious hatred of the other political party.
But, uh, what does “fallout and radiation released negates the time benefits” mean? Does that mean the usual thing, it makes nuking too expensive? Or, do they mean the cooling-off period is too long? Or, just fantasizing here, do they mean that the, oh, I don’t know, health and welfare of billions of people would be negatively affected?
Fallout from any nuking, even smaller ones, does eventually make it to a whole lot of the rest of the world. I’ve seen estimates of how many deaths on the East Coast of America were due to fallout from the above-ground nuclear testing done in the west and southwest. And then, there was the day that all the farmers in Massachusetts had to dump their milk because too-high levels of radioactive iodine from Fukishima (that’s in Japan, you know) were found in it.
So, yeah, I’d agree that “a dozen thermonuclear detonations” is probably not an optimum way to do civil engineering. In fact, I’m still shrieking.
Nukes can solve anything. Could you imagine if the power-hungry Trump used a nuke and realized the power he could wield.
Bububut are you telling me this drooling cretin is still alive? And he’s spouting crap about H-bombs to boot? Like Granpaw pudding-for-brains was suggesting be used as a remedy for hurricanes? What is it with Alzheimer sufferers and nuclear weapons, do they find them sexy or what?
And BTW something similar was suggested by Edward Teller, he wanted to create a better ship route and port in Alaska, just five H-booms needed and Bob’s your uncle.
That particular idea was regarded as “demented”, I hope nobody is going to roll out the warheads this time around, even in these times of runaway madness.