Remember Project Plowshare? Well it has just been resurrected by Newt Gingrich as a way around the Strait of Hormuz. More later. First we need to dive into some history going back to the Iran-Iraq war when the U.S. was supporting Iraq against Iran
There is a recurring pattern in the history of American engagement with the Persian Gulf: an instinct to dominate the region's geography — its straits, its pipelines, its sea lanes — that persists across administrations, decades, and conflicts. I have been able to identify four episodes, -- I'm sure there are more -- separated by years but united by a single logic, illuminate this pattern with particular clarity. They span from catastrophic mistakes in the skies over the Gulf of Oman in 1988 to a viral social media post about nuclear excavation by Newt Gingrich in 2026, and together they form something more than a catalogue of misfortune. They form an argument about how the United States has repeatedly chosen strategic dominance over regional accommodation — and how the consequences of that choice have now produced the most severe disruption to global energy supply since the 1970s oil crisis.
The Stark and the Vincennes
The Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) was one of the bloodiest conflicts of the twentieth century, claiming perhaps a million lives and devastating two of the Gulf's most populous nations. The United States officially maintained neutrality, but in practice tilted decisively toward Iraq, sharing intelligence with Saddam Hussein's military, extending agricultural credits that freed up Iraqi resources for arms purchases, and shielding Baghdad from international condemnation even as evidence mounted that Hussein was deploying chemical weapons against both Iranian forces and his own Kurdish population. The Gulf was a theater of proxy engagement, and American warships patrolled its waters under the banner of protecting neutral shipping — a protection that, as events would demonstrate, was never quite neutral.
On the evening of May 17, 1987, the USS Stark, a guided-missile frigate on patrol in the Persian Gulf, was struck by two Exocet air-to-sea missiles fired by an Iraqi Mirage F-1 jet fighter. Thirty-seven American sailors died. The attack was almost certainly a mistake — the Iraqi pilot appears to have misidentified the Stark as an Iranian vessel — and Iraq apologized and eventually paid reparations to the victims' families. The Reagan administration accepted this explanation with remarkable equanimity and continued its strategic tilt toward Baghdad with barely a pause. There were no ultimatums, no demands for accountability, no lasting diplomatic rupture. In the calculus of American Gulf policy, Iraq's usefulness as a counterweight to revolutionary Iran outweighed the deaths of nearly forty US servicemen.
Just over a year later, on July 3, 1988, the tables — and the consequences — were dramatically reversed. The USS Vincennes was a state-of-the-art Aegis-equipped guided-missile cruiser, known among other Navy vessels by the nickname "Robo-Cruiser," a sardonic reference to the notoriously aggressive command style of Captain Will Rogers III. The Vincennes was engaged in a surface engagement with Iranian gunboats -- this a way before swarming and asymetric warfare, but a precuror --in the Strait of Hormuz when its crew tracked a large aircraft ascending from Bandar Abbas airport. The ship's sophisticated combat information system generated data that the crew interpreted — through a combination of stress, procedural error, and confirmation bias — as an Iranian F-14 fighter on a hostile descent.
The aircraft was Iran Air Flight 655, an Airbus A300B2 commercial jet operating scheduled daily service from Bandar Abbas to Dubai. It was climbing normally, broadcasting its civilian transponder code on the correct civilian frequency, and following the established commercial air corridor. All 290 people aboard were killed, including 66 children traveling with their families.
The American response to this disaster was conspicuously different from how comparable tragedies involving American lives had been handled. The Reagan administration expressed regret — notably, not an apology — and publicly suggested that the Vincennes' crew had acted reasonably given the information available. In 1990, the Navy awarded Captain Rogers the Legion of Merit, its third-highest non-combat decoration, for "meritorious service" during his command tenure. The award was presented without any caveat regarding the events of July 3, 1988. The contrast with the Stark incident was difficult to escape: an Iraqi missile killing American sailors had warranted forgiveness and continued partnership; an American missile killing Iranian civilians warranted, at best, regret and a decoration for the shooter.
The asymmetry was not lost on Tehran. Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini declared that Iran would "never forget" the incident, and it has not. The destruction of Flight 655 hardened Iranian suspicion that American declarations of neutrality were a mask for hostility — a suspicion that subsequent decades did little to dispel. The United States eventually paid $61.8 million in compensation to the victims' families, but did so as part of a legal settlement that explicitly did not constitute an admission of legal responsibility or an apology. Iran has cited the Vincennes incident in virtually every subsequent confrontation with the United States as evidence of the fundamental bad faith it believes underlies American engagement with the region.
The two incidents together — one forgiven, one unacknowledged — established a template for how the United States would navigate Gulf crises: allied actions could be excused; Iranian grievances could be dismissed.
The Peace Pipeline That Wasn't
The Iran-Iraq War ended in August 1988 with a UN-brokered ceasefire, leaving Iran economically devastated and diplomatically isolated. With the world's second-largest proven reserves of both oil and natural gas, Iran desperately needed foreign investment and export infrastructure. The idea that would become known as the Iran-Pakistan-India "Peace Pipeline" emerged from this context, combining Iran's need for revenue with the equally urgent energy appetites of its enormous neighbors.
The concept was first explored in 1989, when Iranian and Indian officials began discussing ways to transport Iranian natural gas to the rapidly growing Indian market. The dialogue soon expanded to include Pakistan, and the proposed Iran-Pakistan-India Pipeline — the IPI — took shape over the following years. It would carry gas from Iran's South Pars field in the Persian Gulf through Baluchistan and onward 2,775 kilometers to Pakistan and India. The economic logic was compelling. Overland pipelines are more secure than shipping options and considerably cheaper — nearly one-fourth the cost of alternatives. Economists calculated that the project could boost Pakistan's and India's GDP by around one percent in its early operational years through lower energy costs and transit fee revenues. Note the current cost of bunker fuel, i.e., the fuel used by ships has doubled, sometimes tripling, since the beginning of Trump's war.
Beyond the economics, the pipeline offered something rarer still in South Asian geopolitics: an opportunity for India and Pakistan to build a shared economic interest that transcended their bitter rivalry. The two nations had fought three wars since their independence in 1947; the prospect of a pipeline whose continued operation required their cooperation was seen by some as a modest but meaningful confidence-building measure. It was for this reason that the project acquired its nickname. The Peace Pipeline, some hoped, might accomplish through commerce what decades of diplomacy had failed to achieve.
The United States wanted none of it. Washington's opposition was neither subtle nor primarily economic in its framing. A senior State Department official named Steven Mann stated publicly that the US was "unequivocally against the deal," declaring that while Washington supported pipelines from the Caspian region, it remained "absolutely opposed to pipelines involving Iran." Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice delivered the same message directly to the Indian government during a 2005 visit, warning New Delhi that American concerns about Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program extended to commercial energy arrangements. The Iran Sanctions Act placed a financial wall around the project, threatening penalties against any foreign company investing more than $20 million annually in Iran's energy sector. American officials argued that the IPI would give Iran an economic lifeline, provide revenue that could fund nuclear development, and undermine the international sanctions regime Washington was working to construct.
The campaign worked, at least partially. Major international energy companies — Malaysia's Petronas, Royal Dutch Shell, France's Total, Australia's BHP — had all expressed interest in financing the pipeline. Under sustained American pressure, they gradually withdrew. India dropped out of the project entirely in 2009, shortly after signing a landmark civilian nuclear cooperation deal with the United States that implicitly required distancing itself from Tehran. The quid pro quo, however unstated, was clear: recognition of India's nuclear program in exchange for abandoning a commercially rational energy arrangement with a neighbor.
Iran and Pakistan pressed on in bilateral form, but the project was repeatedly stalled by American sanctions that blocked international financing, by Pakistani economic fragility, and by the constant threat that companies participating in the project would face US penalties. The pipeline that could have connected three of the world's most populous nations in a web of energy interdependence — potentially giving Iran a tangible stake in regional stability and economic integration — remained unbuilt. In its place, the US promoted the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline, a longer, more expensive, and far less secure alternative that required routing through Taliban-contested Afghan territory and has itself never been completed.
The irony is profound. The stated purpose of blocking the IPI was to isolate Iran and pressure it toward behavioral change. What decades of isolation actually produced was a hardened Iranian leadership with fewer economic stakes in the existing international order, deeper partnerships with Russia and China, and a calculated willingness to use the Strait of Hormuz as a weapon. The Peace Pipeline was killed. The peace it might have helped build was killed with it.The pipeline, itself, engineered to transport natural gas, was built by Iran all the way to within 200 yards of Pakiston. I suspect both India and Pakiston wish now they had completed it.
Project Plowshare — Building a Canal Through Oman with Nukes
To understand the full absurdity of what came next, it is necessary to revisit one of the Cold War's more surreal chapters. The Atomic Energy Commission established what it called Project Plowshare in June 1957 — taking its name from the biblical injunction in Isaiah to "beat their swords into plowshares" — with the stated mission of exploring peaceful applications for nuclear explosives. The driving intellectual force was Edward Teller, the Hungarian-American physicist widely known as the "father of the hydrogen bomb," who believed that the same technology that had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki could be repurposed as the ultimate earth-moving machine.
The ambitions of Plowshare were staggering. Engineers and scientists proposed using nuclear explosions to widen the Panama Canal, carve a new sea-level canal across Nicaragua (dubbed the "Pan-Atomic Canal"), cut highway passes through mountain ranges in California, create a harbor in Alaska by detonating six thermonuclear bombs — with a combined yield 160 times that of the Hiroshima bomb — and connect river systems across the American interior. A 1963 memorandum from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory proposed using 520 two-megaton nuclear explosions to dig a canal through the Negev Desert as an alternative to the Suez Canal. Engineers studying the Panama Canal replacement route proposed setting off 294 nuclear explosives along a Panamanian corridor in 14 separate detonation sequences, releasing the energy equivalent of 166 million tons of TNT — more than three times the yield of the most powerful nuclear device ever tested, the Soviet Tsar Bomba.
To make way for this engineering marvel, planners estimated that approximately 30,000 people — half of them Indigenous — would have to be evacuated and resettled. The Canal Commission's final report addressed this obstacle by noting that "the problems of public acceptance of nuclear canal excavation probably could be solved through diplomacy, public education, and compensating payments." The casual confidence of that sentence — that populations could be compensated for having nuclear bombs detonated in their homelands — speaks volumes about the era's relationship to both nuclear risk and human cost.
President Lyndon Johnson ordered a full formal study in 1964. The program ran 27 nuclear tests at sites across the American West between 1961 and 1973, studying cratering dynamics, slope stability, radioactive contamination, and the feasibility of various excavation scenarios. The results were consistently discouraging. The 1962 Sedan test, the largest underground nuclear detonation ever conducted, created a crater 330 feet deep and nearly a quarter-mile across — and showered fallout across multiple states. Engineers discovered that crater slopes were stable in the dry Nevada desert but dangerously unstable in the wet, water-saturated terrain of Panama or Central America, where the project's most ambitious applications were planned. Natural gas stimulated by underground nuclear explosions proved too radioactive for use in homes or industry. Every application that showed promise ran into either physical limitations, treaty constraints imposed by the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, or overwhelming public opposition.
Project Plowshare was officially terminated in 1977 (!) after two decades of testing, hundreds of millions of dollars in expenditure, and not a single civil engineering project built. It left behind contaminated test sites, irradiated gas fields in Colorado and Wyoming, and a cautionary lesson about the gap between the ambitions of technological confidence and the intractability of physical reality. The dream of peaceful nuclear excavation was, in retrospect, not merely impractical but rooted in a kind of magical thinking — a belief that the most destructive force ever unleashed could be controlled, directed, and made to serve orderly human purposes.
The world moved on. Or so it appeared.
Newt Gingrich and the Return of Plowshare or, My God, I Hope He Doesn't Talk to Trump
In late February 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated airstrikes on Iran under what they called Operation Epic Fury, colloquially known as Operation Epstein Fury, targeting military facilities, nuclear sites, and Iranian leadership. The strikes killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and many senior officials, inflicting significant casualties on Iran's military infrastructure and eliminating anyone with whom to negotiate. Iran's response was swift and severe: ballistic missile and drone strikes against US bases across the Middle East and Israeli territory, and — most consequentially for the global economy — a declaration by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that the Strait of Hormuz was closed.
The closure was not merely rhetorical. Iranian forces deployed mines, attack drones, and surface vessels to enforce the blockade. By early March 2026, shipping traffic through the Strait — which carries roughly 20 to 26 percent of the world's oil and a substantial fraction of global liquefied natural gas, not to mention fertilizer and helium, a necessary component to the manufacture of semiconductors — had slowed to a trickle. Some 2,000 vessels were stranded in the Persian Gulf. The International Energy Agency described it as the most significant supply shock in the history of the oil market. Oil prices surged; US gas prices broke four dollars per gallon for the first time in years; urea prices for agricultural fertilizer rose 50 percent, threatening crop yields across the Northern Hemisphere during the spring planting season. Iran selectively allowed passage to vessels flagged by countries it deemed non-belligerent — China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iraq — effectively conducting a geopolitical sorting of the global shipping industry in real time.
Against this backdrop, on March 15, 2026, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich posted to his verified social media account the following proposal, drawn from a satirical Substack article: "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." He failed to mention it would probably glow in the dark, too.
A community note on the post identified it as originating from a satirical article whose disclaimer stated that its views "do not necessarily represent those of anyone with brain cells." Whether Gingrich understood he was amplifying satire is unclear; his post contained no indication of irony, and he did not subsequently clarify. The proposal drew widespread derision from engineers, arms control experts, and regional analysts, who noted that the experiments conducted by Project Plowshare nearly 70 years earlier had conclusively demonstrated that nuclear excavation in populated or coastal environments would produce radioactive contamination that would make the resulting waterway impassable for decades, that the UAE and Oman — the "friendly territory" through which the canal would presumably run — had not been consulted, and that detonating a dozen thermonuclear weapons in a densely developed commercial region would constitute one of the most catastrophic environmental events in human history.
The proposal was absurd. It was also, in its own dark way, the logical endpoint of a foreign policy tradition stretching back decades. If the Strait of Hormuz is a strategic problem, the American strategic imagination asks: can we build our way around it? Can we impose a technological solution on a geopolitical problem? Can we, in the language of Cold War planners, beat the geography itself into submission?
The Connection: A Single Thread Through Five Decades
These four episodes are not merely illustrative examples of American miscalculation in the Gulf. They are causally connected — each feeding into the next in ways that the actors involved may not have fully understood at the time.
The asymmetric handling of the Stark and Vincennes incidents established, in Iranian strategic thinking, a bedrock conviction: that the United States would excuse any action by its partners and accept no accountability for its own. The downing of Flight 655 and the decoration of the Vincennes' commander confirmed that Iranian lives occupied a different moral register in Washington's calculations. These events provided the ideological foundation for Iranian hardliners who argued, through every subsequent decade of nuclear negotiations and diplomatic overtures, that no American security guarantee was credible and that Iran could rely only on its own deterrence capacity.
The blocking of the Peace Pipeline removed the most promising mechanism by which Iran might have been integrated into the regional economic order. Had the pipeline been built, Iran would have had billions of dollars in annual gas revenues flowing through Pakistan — a country with its own complicated relationship with the United States and nuclear weapons. It would have had a direct material interest in the stability of both Pakistan and India, two nations whose cooperation was essential for continued pipeline operation. It would have had foreign energy companies invested in Iranian infrastructure, creating institutional lobbies in multiple countries for maintaining constructive relations with Tehran. None of this would have transformed Iran into a liberal democracy, but it would have created incentives for cautious, status-quo-oriented behavior. Instead, the isolation that US sanctions imposed drove Iran toward exactly the posture of defiant self-reliance that made it willing, in 2026, to pay the enormous domestic costs of a military confrontation with the world's leading superpower.
The current Strait of Hormuz crisis, in turn, is the direct and foreseeable consequence of the choice to bomb Iran without having a plan for what would happen next. Iran had telegraphed its Hormuz strategy explicitly and repeatedly; the ability to close the strait was its most powerful asymmetric deterrent, and threatening that deterrent while offering no diplomatic off-ramp was virtually certain to trigger its use. The resulting blockade — which has stranded some 2,000 vessels, severed one of the arteries of global energy supply, and produced cascading food and fuel price shocks across the world — is not an unintended consequence. It is the predictable result of a strategic culture that consistently treated Iran as a problem to be solved through pressure and force rather than a state with interests that could, in principle, be addressed through negotiation.
And against this catastrophic backdrop, with the global economy reeling and the US military struggling to define its objectives in a war it initiated, the proposal that enters the American public conversation is a nuclear canal. Not diplomacy. Not a recognition that decades of isolation failed to produce the behavioral change it was designed to achieve. Not an acknowledgment that Iran's grievances — from Flight 655 to the strangled pipeline to the snap-back of sanctions after the 2015 nuclear deal — have any legitimate basis. A nuclear canal.
The ghost of Project Plowshare, it turns out, is not so easily buried. The same confidence that led Cold War engineers to propose detonating 294 nuclear devices in the Panamanian jungle — the confidence that American technological ambition could simply overwrite inconvenient geography — reappears in a 2026 social media post as if no time had passed and no lessons had been learned, especially for people like Gingrich and Trump who don't know the difference between reality and sarcasm.
Four decades of American policy — beginning with the proxy tilt toward Iraq in the 1980s, continuing through the unpunished destruction of a civilian airliner, through the systematic effort to prevent Iran from building economic partnerships with its neighbors, and culminating in a military campaign launched without a clear theory of what success would look like — have produced an Iran that has no particular reason to believe that peaceful behavior will be rewarded.
The USS Stark sailors who died in 1987 deserved justice that was never fully delivered. The 290 passengers and crew of Iran Air Flight 655 deserve an apology that has never been given. The populations of Pakistan, India, and Iran deserved the energy security and economic integration that the Peace Pipeline could have provided. And the world deserves something better than the choice between an Iranian-controlled chokepoint and a proposal to solve the problem with twelve thermonuclear bombs.
Project Plowshare was terminated in 1977 because its practitioners finally confronted the gap between their ambitions and physical reality. The foreign policy tradition it represents — the belief that American power and American technology can simply override the geography of other people's lives — has proven far harder to terminate. Until it is, the Strait will remain what it has always been: not merely a physical passage between two bodies of water, but a mirror in which American strategy is forced to see itself, doesn't like what it sees, but ignores history anyway.
SOURCES
I am grateful to AI for suggesting and finding many of these sources all of which I have read or scanned and verified and formatting and alphabetizing them in MLA format and helping to create notecards.. It's a librarian's wet-dream. I have not included books I read several years ago about the dismantling of the Shah, nor a biography of Edward Teller, but they clearly influenced my concerns. See also my posts on the failure of air campaigns to deliver regime change and on the impending dominance of asymmetric warfare.
"3 July 1988: Iran Air Flight 655 Is Shot Down." The Left Berlin, 7 July 2025, theleftberlin.com/iran-air-flight-655/.
"After Strait of Hormuz Opens, Turmoil Would Still Last Months, Analysts Say." Al Jazeera, 31 Mar. 2026, www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/31/after-strait-of-hormuz-opens-turmoil-would-still-last-months-analysts-say.
"An Explosive Plan to Use Atoms for Peace." HistoryNet, 14 Feb. 2024, www.historynet.com/an-explosive-plan-to-use-atoms-for-peace/.
"The Attack on USS Stark at 30." USNI News, United States Naval Institute, 17 May 2017, news.usni.org/2017/05/17/the-attack-uss-stark-at-30.
"Bypass the Strait of Hormuz with Nuclear Explosives? The US Studied That in Panama and Colombia in the 1960s." The Conversation, 2 Apr. 2026, theconversation.com/bypass-the-strait-of-hormuz-with-nuclear-explosives-the-us-studied-that-in-panama-and-colombia-in-the-1960s-278851.
"Cautious Pragmatism: The Iran-Pakistan-India Pipeline." Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, ipcs.org/focusthemsel.php?articleNo=1787. .
"Ex-GOP Honcho Says Trump Should Drop 'A Dozen' Nukes on Strait of Hormuz." Yahoo News / The Daily Beast, yahoo.com/news/articles/ex-gop-honcho-says-trump-222810675.html. .
"Fact Check: Newt Gingrich Posted about Using Nukes to Create Strait of Hormuz Alternative." Snopes, www.snopes.com/fact-check/newt-gingrich-nukes-strait-hormuz/. .
"Iran Air Flight 655." Encyclopaedia Britannica, www.britannica.com/event/Iran-Air-flight-655. .
"Iran Air Flight 655." Military Wiki, Fandom, military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655. .
"Iran Air Flight 655." Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655. .
"Iran-Pakistan-India Pipeline." Global Energy Monitor, 4 Dec. 2024, www.gem.wiki/Iran-Pakistan-India_Pipeline.
"Iran–Pakistan Gas Pipeline." Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Pakistan_gas_pipeline. .
"Iran's Foreign Policy and the Iran-Pakistan-India Gas Pipeline." Middle East Institute, 29 Jan. 2009, mei.edu/publication/irans-foreign-policy-and-iran-pakistan-india-gas-pipeline/.
Maleki, Abbas. "Iran-Pakistan-India Pipeline: Is It a Peace Pipeline?" MIT Center for International Studies Audit of the Conventional Wisdom, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Sept. 2007, www.belfercenter.org/publication/iran-pakistan-india-pipeline-it-peace-pipeline.
"Middle East Conflict: Situational Updates and Implications for Global Mobility." Newland Chase, last updated 31 Mar. 2026, newlandchase.com/middle-east-crisis-situation-update/.
"Nuke Oman for a Canal: What Could Go Wrong?" More Signal, Less Noise, Substack, lmwalsh.substack.com/p/nuke-oman-for-a-canal-what-could. .
"Oil Prices Jump; Trump Calls on Others to 'Take the Lead' on Strait of Hormuz." The Washington Post, 2 Apr. 2026, www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/04/02/us-iran-war-strait-hormuz-future/.
"Pipeline Politics." The Cairo Review of Global Affairs, 3 Apr. 2015, www.thecairoreview.com/essays/pipeline-politics/.
"The Plowshare Program." Science and Technology, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, st.llnl.gov/news/look-back/plowshare-program. .
"Project Plowshare." Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare. .
"Project Plowshare – Nukes for Peace." Alliance for Innovation and Infrastructure, 10 Apr. 2025, www.aii.org/project-plowshare-nukes-for-peace/.
"The Proposed Iran-Pakistan-India Gas Pipeline: An Unacceptable Risk to Regional Security." The Heritage Foundation, www.heritage.org/asia/report/the-proposed-iran-pakistan-india-gas-pipeline-unacceptable-risk-regional-security. .
"Remembering Iran Air Flight 655: A Victim of US Military Miscalculation in 1988." AeroXplorer, www.aeroxplorer.com/articles/remembering-iran-air-flight-655-a-victim-of-us-military-miscalculation-in-1988.php. .
"The Secret History of Project Plowshare: When We Tried to Build a Better World with Nuclear Bombs." Friendster / Copperberry, 30 Mar. 2026, friendster.click/copperberry/the-secret-history-of-project-plowshare-when-we-tried-to-build-a-better-world-with-nuclear-bombs/.
Temple, Dorinda. "The Iran-Pakistan-India Pipeline: The Intersection of Energy and Politics." ETH Zürich / ISSI, files.ethz.ch/isn/39802/Iran%20Pakistan%20India%20Pipeline.pdf. .
"Traffic Is Trickling through Strait of Hormuz: Who's Moving and Who's Stranded." CNBC, 18 Mar. 2026, www.cnbc.com/2026/03/18/hormuz-bottleneck-vessel-tanker-tracker-shipping-strait-of-hormuz.html.
"Trump Grants Iran Another Extension on a Deadline to Reopen the Strait of Hormuz." NPR, 26 Mar. 2026, www.npr.org/2026/03/26/nx-s1-5761882/iran-war-peace-conditions.
"Trump Ally's Nuclear 'Detonations' Post on Strait of Hormuz Raises Eyebrows." Newsweek, www.newsweek.com/newt-gingrich-nuclear-detonations-strait-of-hormuz-iran-war-11685261. .
"2026 Iran War." Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_war.
"2026 Strait of Hormuz Crisis." Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Strait_of_Hormuz_crisis. .
"USS Stark." Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Stark. .
"USS Stark (FFG-31)." Naval History and Heritage Command, United States Navy, www.history.navy.mil/content/history/museums/nmusn/explore/photography/ships-us/ships-usn-s/uss-stark-ffg-31.html. .
"USS Stark Incident." Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Stark_incident. .
"USS Vincennes Shoots Down Iran Air Flight 655." Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, adst.org/2014/07/uss-vincennes-shoots-down-iran-air-flight-655/. .
"What If We Actually Nuked Our Way around the Hormuz Blockage?" Responsible Statecraft, responsiblestatecraft.org/newt-gingrich-strait-of-hormuz/. .
