WI ?Isreal Floods the Dead sea in the fifties?

WI ?Israel used it's bombs to blow a Canal from the Gulf of Aqaba to the dead sea in the 50's?

flooded sea.png
 

Markus

Banned
Did they have nukes in the 50´s? I thought they got them later, like no sooner than the late 60´s.

By the way, I´m still wondering about the Afro-Asians.
 
Time-travel technology? Why not just use the kind of digging equipment that traitionally gets used to make canals?

OK, technologically this is quite an engineering challenge, but I suspect if they had wanted to, they could have - though probably not in the 50s, when they had better things to do with their scarce resources. My school atlas identifies the watershed at 240 metres at Jebel Mubrak. If you are just interested in getting the water in, drilling a tunnel is probably easier, but if ypou want to build an actual navigable canal, this will take major efforts.

Now, the legal and political headaches connected with this - oy vey. Fiorst, the bottom of Wadi al-Araba is the Israeli-Jordanian border, which means you are going to end up flooding Jordanian as well as Israeli territory and creating a boundary along an artificial waterway of major strategic importance and saddled with considerable maintenance costs - not a good idea to say the least. Then you have to realise that the area arouind the dead sea and a goodly bit of the Jordan Valley are below sea level, which means you are going to flood a couple hundred square kilometres of land, some of it among Israel's and Jordan's most fertile. Jordan is probably going to be more concerned, given Israel has the coastal slopes with the Mediterranean rains. Then you are also going to affect a largish part of the West Bank, so even post-occupation it's going to be a legal nightmare to figure it out.

I'm not sure the added rainfall and new port facilities will compensate for that.
 
Hydroelectricity with salt water is somewhat tricky due to higher corrosion, especially with 50/60s technology (and sand, which is a regular issue for the shorter Suez Canal a bit to the west would also be a bit of a pain for the turbines).

Another question is: how much would they want to flood the Dead Sea? Don't forget the Sea of Galilee is a freshwater lake (quite a commodity in such an arid region), pouring Seawater into it would be rather stupid.
 
Jordan may have issues with Israel flooding its land. But I don't expect Israel would lose any sleep over that.

I *really* don't think Israel wants to create a precedent for unilaterally doing major civil engineering. Remember where the springs of the Jordan are located...
 

Raymann

Banned
I don't know if it was worth it for them in the 50's but by the late 60's they could certainly dig it the old fashioned way. As for cooperation with Jordan and Syria...after the Six Day War, what are they going to do about it?
 

Valdemar II

Banned
The last few decades the Dead Sea has shrunk, because of the intensive use of the Jordan River. A alternative idea could be a that Isreal just put as just much water into the Dead Sea so it doesn't shrink, it would also give Israel access to enourmous quantities of hydroelectricies mostly free, and could help Israel develop the southen part of the country (the electricy could be used to desalinination of seawater.)
 
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