I literally posted the same suggestion in this community three days ago as a joke!
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2026
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NonCredibleDefense
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Still asking, how bad would it be? Old craters are safe enough to walk through, and modern nukes can be rendered less radioactive, right? So how much less would it have to be that this would go from an environmental and geopolitical catastrophe that future generations will condemn us for to merely an unbelievably bad idea?
Sure, the future canal would be mostly safe, especially after decades. But there's a rather big problem in that making the canal very much wouldn't be.
Using nukes for mining was actually tried, it left a very impressive crater you can visit today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedan_(nuclear_test)
It also caused more fallout than any nuclear bomb ever. And the crater is "only" about 450m. So you're going to be blasting a LOT of highly radioactive dust into the surrounding several countries. Even with more efficient nukes causing less fallout, that's probably not going to be very popular.
The material doesn't go away by magic. It gets ejected and scattered over a wide area, after being in a nuclear explosion and getting highly irradiated. The blasting a canal would throw an entire canal's worth of fallout around the area. That will go away mostly eventually, but it won't be fun living within several hundreds of kilometers for a for decades.
And of course, even with the decades old Sedan crater, there's a giant radiative ball underneath.
Also, unless you’re dropping the bombs from a B-1, you have to actually take nukes to the middle east, on the ground, and trust that no-one wants to steal them.
You need to drill a hole and lower it down, or you won't get such a good crater. Most ground-level blasts create very shallow craters, because (and this will surprise nobody with more braincells than brainworms) air is much easier to move than rock.
That test made a 450 meter wide crater, and they want to make a canal on the order of 100km long? I think that might take a bit more than a dozen detonations...
Well, bombs are MUCH bigger now. Of course, using fewer larger bombs creates MUCH more ejecta than more smaller bombs.
That's true, but crater width doesn't scale linearly with bomb yield so I don't think you could get it down to a dozen even with the largest bombs we have available today.
That's true. But that's very much the least of the problems with this moronic idea. Newt would give zero fucks about making it 1200 bombs instead of 12.