Was there really "US plan"? The memo says it's "informal report", "this crude preliminary investigation". It seems to just one person having an idea and doing crude back on the envelope calculations. The memo was probably part of Operation Plowshare, trying to find civilian uses for nukes.

Project Chariot on the other hand was almost implemented. The original plan was to simultaneous explosion of 5 nukes to create artificial harbor in Alaska.

original headline: "The US had a plan in the 1960s to blast an alternative Suez Canal through Israel using 520 nuclear bombs". Apologies for omitting the decade to fit the length limit, but the other details seemed more important.

The date is almost certainly a more useful piece of information than the amount of explosives to be used.

Without the date, someone could mistake this for news about a modern plan, especially following the fairly recent Suez issue

I dunno, I thought 520 nuclear blasts was a pretty vivid mental image :)

That sort of thing could only ever fly in a pre-1980s world anyway, not something anyone would seriously propose these days.

>>That sort of thing could only ever fly in a pre-1980s world anyway, not something anyone would seriously propose these days.

You'd think, but nuking hurricanes somehow briefly became a topic during the last US presidential election.

They were into that back in the '60s too. Check out Project STORMFURY: https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/730016.pdf

And I complain about our current government...

Let us give thanks for all those things that never were !