A tunnel to link Russia and the USA?: the unexpected proposal to build an underwater route in the Bering Strait

“Imagine connecting USA and Russiathe Americas and Afro-Eurasia with the Putin-Trump tunnela 70-mile link that would symbolize unity,” wrote the Russian business representative on social network X.

According to Dmitriev, the financing could be provided by the Kremlin together with “international partners” of his institution and the works would take about eight years to complete. Putin’s envoy in the US justified his proposal by stating that it will generate long-term economic benefits and improve relations between the two states.

“The Putin-Trump tunnel connecting rail and freight would facilitate joint resource exploration. Joint projects between the United States and Russia would create jobs and boost economies,” he said.

The map shared by the head of the RDIF in Bering Strait. The route would culminate in a single point located in Alaska (United States).

A project that is not new

He Bering Strait It is 82 kilometers long in its shortest segment, which has generated constant concern about how viable it could be to connect Asia and America with a major infrastructure project.

Although conditions can become extreme during the coldest season, characterized by the appearance of ice in the region, and pose a challenge to the stability of a work of this magnitude, the low average depth of the strait and the presence of the small Diomedes Islands also provide a usable opportunity for the planning of a tunnel.

These factors have meant that the idea has been on the desks of Russian and American political leaders for more than a century.

The first sketches of a work of this caliber date back to the end of the 19th century when William Gilpin, governor of the state of Colorado, suggested a link between Russia and the United States through the strait as part of a global-scale railway.

During that time, the American engineer Joseph Strauss, famous for the Golden Gate Bridge, presented the defunct Russian Empire with a detailed plan to create a railway bridge that would cross that same route, but ended up encountering a negative response from the tsar and his advisors.

Already at the beginning of the 20th century, more proposals arose from the American railroad industry, although on this occasion a bridge was no longer being planned but a tunnel. The idea finally seemed to have an echo from Russia, but the refusal of the United States government and the European wars would end up causing the project to fall into oblivion again.

During the 1940s and 1950s, different proposals for a link between Asia and North America resurfaced after the completion of the Alaska Highway, another large-scale work that renewed interest in the territorial connection in order to promote trade and economic development.

One of these projects consisted of a bridge that would extend the Alaskan highway across the strait from the town of Nome, entering the then Soviet territory and reaching Irkutsk, in the heart of Siberia, but this idea was not realized either.

In 1958, the prestigious Chinese-American engineer Tung Yen Lin conceived the “Intercontinental Peace Bridge” to connect Alaska and Siberia, a project that held his interest for decades and for which he even created a non-profit organization, personally delivering a plan with a complete design for the work to Ronald Reagan. Lin would die in 2003 without seeing any progress in this regard.

More curious was the case of Neil Bush, the most problematic of George W. Bush, who was interested in the creation of a tunnel in the strait that separates Asia and America. The brother of the former US president became close to South Korean Sun Myung Moon, who promoted the idea of ​​creating the “King of World Peace Tunnel” to run through the Bering Strait.

Moon was a well-known businessman and media owner who had founded his own Christian church with peculiar messianic aspirations. His idea for an 85 km-long bridge extending beneath the Bering Sea led him on a world tour to promote the project, considered unserious due to its lack of financing and other controversies.

The current century would also bring news from a new stakeholder: China. Media such as The Washington Post reported a decade ago that a group of experts from the Academy of Engineering of that country and local authorities were analyzing the viability of a large railway route that would begin its journey in Manchuria, pass through Siberia and cross the strait through a 200 km underwater tunnel.

The plan not only contemplated reaching Alaska, since the route had the Canadian city of Edmonton as its final destination, although it did not go beyond being an extremely ambitious concept.

Similar works