Highway to Heaven

Imagine the world joined together by a vast international system of highways, railways, bridges, and tunnels, making all nations accessible and connected as one global family. 

It’s an incredible vision shared by the late Rev. Dr. Sun Myung Moon and Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon, who co-founded Peace Road and dedicated more than four decades toward bringing the global peace initiative to life.

A panel of experts discussed the impact and need for such a powerful network on August 5 in a webinar hosted by the Universal Peace Federation (UFP)—which organizes Peace Road—as the 2021 campaign “Drawing Nations and People Together as Neighbors” kicked off earlier this week in Chicago.

“Peace Road helps create an interdependent, interconnected, and harmonious world,” said Dr. Thomas Walsh, UPF’s chairman and a webinar speaker. The flagship project of Peace Road, an International Peace Highway, aims to build an undersea tunnel between Korea and Japan, and a Bering Strait tunnel to connect Alaska and Siberia. Dr. Walsh said the focus of Peace Road 2021 is the tunnel that would connect the US and Russia, running under the Bering Strait.

The concept of Peace Road—which draws from the world’s history of connectivity, including the ancient Silk Road and Royal Road of the Persian Empire—was first introduced by Rev. Moon at the 10th International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences (ICUS) in Seoul in 1981. Rev. and Dr. Moon reemphasized the importance of Peace Road in 2005 during the inauguration of UPF.

“Carrying out this project will bind the world together as one village,” Rev. Moon said. “It will tear down the man-made walls of race, culture, religion, and country, and establish the world of peace that has been God’s cherished desire… The United States and Russia can become as one… and all nations, and also all the world’s religions, can combine their energies to succeed in this project.”

Large-scale biking, walking, and driving tours in major cities worldwide have been a key part in Peace Road’s timeline of educational efforts and raising public awareness over the years. Today, it’s become a global project involving 125 nations aimed at promoting world peace.

Rick Minnich, a panel speaker and director of the documentary “Strait Guys,” said a Bering tunnel would bring “peace, progress, and prosperity to all.” A clip from his film—debuting later this year—showed collective efforts to talk with native people opposed to big changes and building the tunnel.

“This really has the potential of being the Panama Canal of the 21st Century,” says Scott Spencer, the chief project advisor of the Intercontinental Railway featured in Minnich’s film. The railway stretches 5,500 miles and would link the existing systems in North America through Canada and Alaska, says Spencer, before joining a 70-mile long tunnel under the Bering Strait that continues on to the existing rail systems of Russia and China.

However, Dr. Vladimir Petrovskiy, chief researcher at the Institute of Far Eastern Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences, called a Bering Strait tunnel project “very ambitious” and “very strategic.” He said such an infrastructure project would involve resources of national governments and affect the global, regional and transregional economy. It would also have “political implications,” he said, as he pointed to different interpretations of the law of the sea, and China’s two-pronged “Belt and Road Initiative” to promote economic development and interregional connectivity: the Silk Road Economic Belt and Maritime Silk Road. 

“China allocates 80 percent of their resources to sea route communications,” he said. “This directly implicates the Bering Strait project because it connects the Russian polar region and Alaska and that sea route.” A global shift toward “green” renewable energy will also change the global economy, Dr. Petrovskiy noted. 

Still, panel speakers agreed investment in the Bering Strait tunnel project is inspiring and needed.

“[This project] doesn’t lack scientific background or engineering or anything other than the relations between nations,” said UPF International President Dr. Michael Jenkins. “If America and Russia could cooperate on this, it could happen very quickly.” 

As the 2021 Peace Road campaign rolls out in the US and Canada over the next few weeks, and efforts toward the Bering Strait tunnel project push forward, the founders’ vision remains within reach: “The success of this project will be decisive in establishing a peace kingdom where people will no longer make war with each other,” said Rev. Moon.

Stay tuned for more Peace Road updates. You can learn more about the 2021 campaign and itinerary here.

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