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Russia ready to build super tunnel
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IT would cost US$60 billion, take 20 years to complete and even then would link only two of the world's most remote places. Yet a tunnel between Russia and America under the Bering Strait can and will be built, according to a senior Moscow official.
Emboldened by the new millennium, the man in charge of modernizing Russia's vast but creaking infrastructure has said that the construction of a 96km tunnel under the international dateline from eastern Chukotka to western Alaska is only a matter of time. The money, he insists, is available.
The tunnel would be the biggest project of its kind. At the windswept point where they appear on most maps to kiss, the Russian and American mainlands are separated by only 37km of water and their furthest outposts, the Diomede Islands, by three. An international feasibility study concluded, however, that to be safe a tunnel joining them would have to be more than twice as long.
The study is ready to go before the World Bank and the US and Russian Governments with a draft agreement on how to take the project forward, Viktor Razbegin, director of Moscow's Centre for Regional Transport Projects, said.
Russians have been obsessed with finding their own land routes to America, however long and arduous, ever since Peter the Great sent Captain Vitus Bering of the Imperial Russian Navy to discover what lay at the easternmost reaches of his continent in 1725.
From 1917 to 1991 the Diomede Islands were home only to birds of passage and frontier troops. Since then Alaskan businessmen have tried to establish links with destitute Chukotka, but have largely failed. Maybe all they need is a tunnel.(SD-Agencies)
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