Let us be clear about one thing from the outset: this article is based upon a social post by Newt Gingrich, the article that Newt Gingrich shared in March 2026, proposing that nuclear weapons be used to blast a new canal around the Strait of Hormuz, was — according to the article itself — satire. And, it most definitely was, it was funny and everything. So that’s fine. Nothing to see here. Except that Newt Gingrich shared it. Without clarification. Without a winking emoji (if that’s your thing). Without any of the usual signals that a seventy-something former Speaker of the House of Representatives is definitely, definitely joking about the operational deployment of thermonuclear devices in the Middle East. And if you know anything about Newt Gingrich — and we know rather more than we’d like — the benefit of the doubt has some limits.
So we are going to do what Boson does. We are going to take it seriously. We are going to weigh the evidence. We are going to give Mr Gingrich the full respect his decades of public service either do or do not merit, and we are going to examine this proposal on its actual merits. Because here is the thing: beneath the satire, beneath Gingrich’s post, beneath all of it, there is a real historical plan. A real American government programme. Real congressional funding. Real physicists. Real displaced Indigenous communities. And it is that plan — born in an era when the United States was at the absolute summit of its confidence, when it was still in its pomp, when the idea that American ingenuity plus atomic energy could solve any problem on earth seemed not just plausible but inevitable — that sits underneath this whole conversation like bedrock.
They called it Project Plowshare. Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, led it. The idea was elegant in the way that only ideas developed by people with very large budgets and no immediate consequences can be: nuclear explosions make big holes, big holes are economically useful, therefore nuclear explosions are an infrastructure tool. Harbours. Canals. Mountain roads. Gas extraction. The atoms-for-peace era was in full swing and Teller wanted his bombs to build things. For twenty years, the United States government agreed that this was worth pursuing.
The thirty thousand people who would have needed relocating from the Panamanian blast zone — half of them Indigenous — were described in the commission’s final report as “a formidable but not impossible obstacle.” Formidable. But not impossible. We mention this because it is the same quality of thinking, the same cheerful assumption that the humans in the way of a large idea are essentially a rounding error, that seems to animate a certain strand of current American ambition. Whether that strand includes Newt Gingrich is, as he has not clarified, technically still an open question.
The plan itself, assessed without prejudice
Let us give Gingrich — and Teller, and the commission, and the entire magnificent tradition of solving geopolitical problems with geology — a fair hearing. The Strait of Hormuz is a genuine chokepoint. Iran’s ability to threaten it is a genuine problem. A bypass canal through friendly territory would, in a narrow technical sense, address that problem. The logic is not insane. It is merely the last step of the logic that is insane, and sometimes those steps go by quickly.
- Definitively resolves Iranian leverage over global oil supply, along with a number of other things that are harder to list
- Has genuine historical precedent — this was a funded U.S. government programme, not a fringe idea
- Nuclear excavation is, in a strictly technical sense, the most efficient earthmoving method ever conceived
- Would send an unambiguous signal to anyone considering blocking a canal in future
- Born of the same era of American confidence that put men on the moon; one hesitates to dismiss it entirely
- Could, with the right framing, probably be described as a shovel-ready infrastructure project
- Radioactive fallout is, across all available evidence, unpopular with the people it falls on
- The territory required runs through one or more country that may not be crazy about it
- The Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 remains, for now, in force
- 294 devices were proposed for the Panama route; the Hormuz equivalent would be at minimum comparable
- The original project was eventually shelved because the rock was the wrong kind — nobody has checked the rock here
- Once you have used nuclear weapons to build a canal, the question of when next to use them answers itself rather more easily
The bit where we note we’ve all been doing it wrong
Which brings us to the wider point, and it is a point we feel has been insufficiently made. If nuclear devices represent, as Project Plowshare sincerely argued, the most rational solution to large logistical problems — if the commission was right that the only real obstacles were diplomatic, educational, and financial rather than moral — then we have to ask ourselves an uncomfortable question. What exactly have we been doing?
The average British road improvement project takes eleven years from proposal to tarmac. Heathrow’s third runway has been “imminent” since approximately the first Obama administration. HS2, conceived as a bold national infrastructure statement, has been value-engineered down to a single line between London and Birmingham that manages to be both enormously expensive and somehow less useful than the train it replaces. We have been out here, all of us, struggling through our days like absolute chumps, booking contractors, filling in planning applications, waiting on hold to the council — when, it seems there’s another way, one I can well imagine Mr Farage, with his love of all things American would genuinely back (no smiley face).
The Nuclear Option Calculator
In the spirit of Project Plowshare’s central insight — that no problem is too large or too small to be approached with the right amount of yield — we have built a tool. Enter any task you have been handling the slow way. Find out how many devices it would actually take. We have all been leaving performance on the table.
Project Plowshare was real. The canal commission and its figures are real. The thirty thousand people are real. Newt Gingrich’s post was real, as most likely was his seriousness.
