Bering Strait Tunnel (베링해협 터널 / World Peace King Bridge and Tunnel): The Engineering Corollary of the Pacific Rim Doctrine in the Late Teaching of Sun Myung Moon

Bering Strait Tunnel

베링해협 터널 · World Peace King Bridge and Tunnel · World Super-Highway

What Is the Bering Strait Tunnel?

The Bering Strait Tunnel — proclaimed under the formal name “World Peace King Bridge and Tunnel” (월드 피스 킹 브리지 앤드 터널) — is the late-period proposal of Rev. Sun Myung Moon for an infrastructure project linking the North American and Eurasian continents across the Bering Strait by either a bridge or an undersea tunnel, completing a globe-encircling “World Super-Highway” (세계초고속도로) from the Cape of Good Hope to Santiago, from London to New York.

The proposal was first proclaimed in November 2005 and elaborated across multiple subsequent proclamations and Hoon Dok Hae expositions in the Peace Messages.

Its providential purpose, in Rev. Moon’s formulation, is to make the world into a single “one-day living sphere” (일일생활권, 一日生活圈) governed by a United Nations resolution prohibiting the transport of weapons of war on the road.

I argue that the Bering Strait Tunnel functions in the late teaching of Sun Myung Moon not as visionary geopolitical commentary but as the engineering corollary of the Pacific Rim and Abel UN doctrines — a doctrinally necessary infrastructure project whose purpose is the substantial physical reversal of Satan’s continental division of humanity.

The proposal completes on the level of physical geography what the Holy Marriage Blessing accomplishes on the level of lineage: where the Blessing restores the satanically corrupted bloodline, the Bering Strait Tunnel restores the satanically divided land.

The reading defended below holds that the project is literal-engineering rather than visionary-symbolic and is integral rather than ornamental to the late-period providential architecture.

This is why I paved the way from earth to heaven by opening the gates of hell on earth and in the spirit world, centered on God’s love. The name of the International Peace Highway came from this. This is to break down the wall, which has been blocking us.

— Sun Myung Moon (02/01/1986) Cheon Seong Gyeong

This 1986 statement gives the doctrine its etymological origin within Rev. Moon’s teaching. The International Peace Highway was already, in 1986, understood as a wall-breaking project — the engineering counterpart of the spiritual opening of the gates of hell.

The Bering Strait Tunnel, proposed nearly twenty years later, completes that original International Peace Highway concept by extending it across the last unbridged continental gap in the providential geography.

The Proposal Names Both a Bridge and an Undersea Tunnel

The doctrine permits two engineering modalities — a bridge spanning the Bering Strait or an undersea tunnel beneath it — and is indifferent as to which is built, provided that the continents are physically joined for vehicular traffic.

The Strait is approximately 85 kilometers wide at its narrowest point between Cape Dezhnev (Russia) and Cape Prince of Wales (Alaska), with the Diomede Islands at its midpoint roughly halving the span.

The proposal is therefore not engineering fantasy: a bridge of comparable length to existing maritime structures, or a tunnel of comparable length to the Channel Tunnel between Britain and France, is technically conceivable.

Intending to build the ideal kingdom of heaven that is God’s desire, I am promoting the world’s grandest project, which is to build a tunnel under the Bering Strait. It will be part of the creation of the International Highway of Peace, which is to connect all oceans and continents and allow people to travel at full speed around the globe..

— Sun Myung Moon (Peace Message XV, July 4, 2007), Pyeonghwa Gyeong

The proclamation specifies four endpoints — Cape of Good Hope, Santiago, London, and New York — which together describe a closed loop spanning every inhabited continent.

From any one endpoint, a driver may, in principle, reach any other endpoint by automobile, with the Bering Strait crossing as the single unbridged segment that the project would supply.

The doctrine, therefore, does not merely propose a piece of infrastructure; it proposes the closure of the global vehicular network. The integer commitment is that no continent will remain an island.

The Bering Strait Is the Third of the Three Great Problems

The Bering Strait Tunnel doctrine identifies three providential geographic problems that the True Parents who come must resolve: the division of the Korean peninsula along the thirty-eighth parallel and the continental division at the Bering Strait.

The triad is doctrinally fixed and is treated in the late teaching as the architectural framework of the True Parents’ remaining providential work.

The triad is doctrinally significant in several ways.

First, it identifies the satanic agency behind each division: the false parents — the satanic agency of the Fall — are named as the causal source of all three geographic ruptures.

Second, it identifies the True Parents as the providentially responsible agency for their resolution; the doctrine refuses to relocate this responsibility onto secular political actors.

Third, the triad is structurally complete: a religious-civilizational rupture, a political-ideological rupture (Korean DMZ), and a geological-geographic rupture (Bering Strait) together exhaust the categories of fundamental human division.

The Bering Strait, as the natural-geographic member of the triad, is the deepest of the three problems because it precedes politics and religion in the order of created givens.

The International Peace Highway Is the Doctrinal Precursor

The Bering Strait Tunnel did not emerge from nowhere in 2005. It is the late-period completion of a much older proposal, the International Peace Highway, whose origins lie in the early 1980s and whose name was formally announced in 1986.

The original International Peace Highway envisioned an undersea tunnel between Korea and Japan as its first link, followed by a Trans-Asian highway connecting the Korean peninsula through China and Central Asia to Europe. Rev. Moon began advocating for the Korea-Japan tunnel publicly in the early 1980s, and excavation work was actually undertaken at the Karatsu site in southern Japan.

The doctrinal grounding for the precursor highway lay in the typological geography of the Pacific Rim doctrine: Japan as the island Eve-nation must connect to the continental Adam-nation (Korea), and from there to the wider continental archangelic geography.

The 1986 statement quoted above frames this connection in soteriological terms — the highway is the engineering counterpart of the spiritual opening of the gates of heaven and hell. By 1988, Rev. Moon was articulating the connection as a geopolitical necessity.

Where will Japan go? Should she cross the Pacific Ocean to be carried on America’s back or should she connect with the continent? This is the question. The shortest route is to go through the Korean peninsula.

— Sun Myung Moon (05/15/1988) Cheon Seong Gyeong

The 1988 statement establishes the principle: the Eve-nation must connect to the continental Adam-nation by the shortest geographic route, and the connecting infrastructure is doctrinally required, not contingent. The Bering Strait Tunnel of 2005 extends this principle to the global scale.

If Japan must connect to the Eurasian landmass via Korea, then the American continent must connect to Eurasia via Alaska.

The doctrine of the Pacific Rim, in its late-period formulation, requires that all continents become substantially one, and the Bering Strait Tunnel is the engineering implication of this requirement.

Alaska itself is doctrinally significant as the geographic pivot of the crossing. In his teachings of the 1990s, Rev. Moon repeatedly identified Alaska as the providential hub between the three landmasses of Eurasia, North America, and the polar region.

If the tundra region of Siberia and the North American plains are to be developed in the future, Alaska should also be developed. The first person who occupies the ice-covered world of the North Pole will be able to influence the world. The one who occupies the sea will rule the world.

— Sun Myung Moon (08/29/1991), Cheon Seong Gyeong

The 1991 statement identifies Alaska as the geographic key to both the continental and the maritime dimensions of the Pacific Rim providence. Its position at the confluence of the Bering Strait, the Pacific Ocean, and the Arctic makes it the doctrinally necessary location of the crossing point. Rev. Moon’s extensive work in Alaska through the 1980s and 1990s — including the founding of fishing enterprises, the Ceremony of the Settlement of the Eight Stages at Kodiak in 1989, and the educational programs of the period — is in retrospect legible as the preparatory work for the Bering Strait Tunnel proposal that 2005 would formally announce.

The continuity is therefore not merely thematic. The International Peace Highway of 1986 and the Bering Strait Tunnel of 2005 are two stages of a single project: the substantial-physical unification of the global living sphere into one circumnavigable network. The latter completes the former.

The Demilitarization Principle Is Doctrinally Central

The Bering Strait Tunnel doctrine is not merely about connection; it is about the kind of connection.

The project specifies a demilitarization principle: the road, once built, would be governed by a United Nations resolution prohibiting the transport of weapons of war upon it. Atomic weapons, weapon components, and military matériel of any kind would be denied passage.

The road is thus not infrastructure neutral regarding the use to which it is put; it is, by design, a road on which war cannot move.

This principle is doctrinally consequential. War in the modern world requires logistics — the transport of weapons, fuel, personnel, and supplies across long distances.

A globally connected road system on which weapons cannot move is, in effect, a globally connected road system on which war cannot be efficiently waged.

The Bering Strait Tunnel doctrine, therefore, reads infrastructure as a peace mechanism: the same physical roads that connect the continents also, by their legal regime, prevent the continents from making war on one another.

The integration of the demilitarization principle with the Abel UN doctrine is explicit. The Abel UN — Rev. Moon’s proposed second chamber for the United Nations, in which religious and peace leaders would balance the political representation of the existing UN General Assembly—would administer the weapons-prohibition regime on the World Peace King Bridge and Tunnel.

The Bering Strait Tunnel and the Abel UN are therefore doctrinally complementary: the road is the substance, and the Abel UN is the form. Without the demilitarization regime, the road is merely transport; with it, the road is peace.

The doctrine of the road frames its juridical regime as a heavenly warning rather than as a contingent policy preference.

The capstone is doctrinally consequential. The demilitarization principle is presented not as Rev. Moon’s personal policy preference but as a heavenly warning — a providential injunction that division can no longer be tolerated.

The walls Satan erected are enumerated as racial, cultural, religious, and national; the road is the physical instrument by which these walls are simultaneously broken.

The doctrine, therefore, reads the World Peace King Bridge and Tunnel not as one peace initiative among many but as the substantial physical implementation of heaven’s injunction against further division.

The Project Is Engineering, Not Symbolism

The proposal includes detailed engineering doctrinally consequential specifications. The road is described not as a single highway but as a global superhighway, with 8 to 16 lanes, designed for unprecedented vehicular speeds.

The Bering Strait crossing is described as either a bridge or an undersea tunnel, indicating that the doctrine is technically open as to the engineering modality but committed to the physical reality of the crossing. Rev. Moon committed concrete personal financial reserves to the project, indicating a financial seriousness incompatible with merely symbolic intent.

The proposal was elaborated to political and religious leaders gathered at multiple international rallies of the Universal Peace Federation in the years following 2005.

The doctrinal point is that the project is not a metaphor. A press-die metaphor for the Five Stages of the Blessing remains a metaphor — there is no actual industrial press involved in the propagation of the Holy Marriage Blessing. A peace-highway metaphor for spiritual transformation would similarly be a metaphor. But Rev. Moon’s late teaching consistently distinguishes the spiritual significance of the project from its physical reality and asserts both. The road must be built. The continents must be physically joined. The vehicles must literally drive.

The doctrine refuses the deflationary move that would reduce the project to an inspirational allegory.

The strongest argument for the literal-engineering reading is internal to the doctrine itself: Rev. Moon repeatedly distinguishes between the spiritual highway of love (referenced in Family Pledge Number Five — “let us pave a true love highway”) and the physical World Peace King Bridge and Tunnel.

The two are doctrinally parallel but not identical: the spiritual highway is the inner reality, the physical highway is its outer realization, and the providential moment of the late teaching is precisely the moment when the outer must be built because the inner has been completed.

Internal Doctrinal Development: From 1981 Korea-Japan Tunnel to 2005 Bering Strait Proclamation

The Bering Strait Tunnel doctrine develops across four discernible phases. In the first phase, the early 1980s, Rev. Moon publicly advocated for an undersea tunnel between Korea and Japan as the first link of a Eurasian peace highway.

Excavation work was undertaken at the Karatsu site in southern Japan. The proposal in this phase was bilateral in scope — connecting the Eve-nation to the Adam-nation across the Korea Strait.

In the second phase, the mid-1980s, the bilateral proposal acquired its full conceptual frame as the “International Peace Highway,” with the soteriological grounding articulated in the 1986 statement on the opening of the gates of heaven and hell.

The doctrine in this phase still envisioned a Eurasian highway, with America connected only across the Pacific by ship.

In the third phase, the 1990s, the proposal expanded geographically. The Trans-Asian dimension was articulated more fully, with Rev. Moon proposing that the highway would connect Korea through China, Central Asia, and the Middle East to Europe, with all weapons and military matériel excluded from its use.

The doctrine in this phase remained conceptually open at the Pacific end — the Americas had not yet been integrated into the road network.

In the fourth phase, the late period after 2001, the Bering Strait Tunnel proposal closed the conceptual loop.

The proclamation of the Peace Message in 2005 added the Bering Strait crossing as the final link, completing the circumnavigable network.

The Hoon Dok Hae expositions of 2006–2008 (recorded extensively in the late-period addresses) elaborated the proposal at length, identifying it as the third of the Three Great Problems and integrating it with the Abel UN, the Pacific Rim doctrine, and the New Civilizational Opening Era proclaimed at Hawaiʻi on March 17, 2006.

The development arc, therefore, moves from a bilateral Korea-Japan link (1981) through a Eurasian highway (1986–1990s) to a globally closed network (2005), and the Bering Strait Tunnel is the doctrinal closure of the arc.

The Practical Dimension for Blessed Families

For Blessed Families, the Bering Strait Tunnel doctrine specifies a public-affairs orientation that integrates with the broader late-period providential agenda.

The project requires three kinds of work that Blessed Families are called to support: the political work of building consensus among the four affected powers (the United States, Russia, Japan, and the affected indigenous peoples of Alaska and Chukotka); the financial work of mobilizing resources at the scale required for a multi-decade infrastructure project; and the institutional work of supporting the Abel UN as the demilitarization-administering body.

The doctrine also assigns a particular responsibility to Blessed Families in the four endpoint nations and the transit nations.

American Blessed Families bear the responsibility of moving American policy toward a partnership with Russia on the project. Japanese Blessed Families bear the financial and continuity responsibility (the doctrine consistently identifies Japan as the Eve-nation with the financial mission). Korean Blessed Families bear the responsibility of completing the predecessor Korea-Japan tunnel, without which the larger Eurasian highway cannot function. Russian Blessed Families bear the responsibility of building the eastern transit infrastructure across Siberia.

The doctrine refuses to treat the project as one to be left to secular states; it specifies that the providential responsibility lies with the Blessed-Family network.

Interreligious Resonance

Christianity. The closest cross-tradition parallel to the Bering Strait Tunnel doctrine is the Isaianic theology of the highway prepared for the Lord, in which the geographic preparation of the way is the substantial precondition of the divine arrival.

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.

— Isaiah 40:3-4 (KJV)

The parallel is structural and explicit: both traditions articulate the eschatological preparation of geography as substantial work, in which the physical leveling of mountains and the connection of separated regions are the precondition of the divine arrival.

The point of difference is the agent: in the Isaianic theology, the highway is prepared by penitent humanity for God’s coming; in the Bering Strait Tunnel doctrine, the highway is built under the providential authority of the True Parents, who have already come, in fulfillment rather than anticipation of the divine arrival.

Confucianism. The Confucian classical tradition contains the ideal of 大同 (Great Unity, Datong) — the universal harmony in which all under heaven becomes one family. The Liyun (禮運) chapter of the Liji envisions a world without locked doors, in which strangers are received as kin and the strong support the weak (Analects 12.5, Legge).

The parallel to the one-day living sphere of the Bering Strait Tunnel doctrine is the conviction that the dissolution of barriers — physical, social, and moral — is the providential goal of history. The divergence is causal: in the Confucian doctrine, the Great Unity emerges from moral cultivation; in the Unification doctrine, the one-day living sphere is engineered into being under the providential authority of the True Parents.

Buddhism. The Mahāyāna doctrine of 大乗 (Great Vehicle) names the ferrying of all sentient beings to liberation as the universal soteriological task. The parallel to the Bering Strait Tunnel is the conviction that the means of universal salvation must be sufficient to carry all, without exclusion. The divergence is the medium: the Buddhist Vehicle is metaphysical-soteriological; the Unification Highway is physical-engineering, but with an explicitly soteriological purpose.

Islam. Islamic doctrine grounds the universal community in the Hajj — the obligation of pilgrimage to Mecca — which presupposes the unimpeded passage of pilgrims across all borders. The parallel to the Bering Strait Tunnel is the principle that the universal community requires guaranteed passage. The Qur’an enjoins protection of the sacred routes (Q 5:97, Pickthall) and the universal accessibility of the holy places.

Judaism. The Tanakh’s vision of the eschatological mountain to which all nations stream (Isa 2:2–3 JPS) parallels the one-day living sphere in its universal-gathering image. The divergence is the directionality: the Isaianic mountain is the destination to which all come; the Bering Strait Tunnel is the network by which all reach one another, with no privileged centre.

What is distinctive about the Unification Bering Strait Tunnel doctrine is the explicit demilitarization principle. No other tradition couples the universal highway with a juridical mechanism for excluding war from its use.

The doctrine fuses the Isaianic highway image with a United Nations legal mechanism, producing a uniquely engineered juridical articulation of the universal-peace doctrine.

Analytical Synthesis

The reading defended in this entry is that the Bering Strait Tunnel — the World Peace King Bridge and Tunnel — is the engineering corollary of the Pacific Rim and Abel UN doctrines, a doctrinally necessary project whose literal physical realization is the substantial reversal of Satan’s continental division of humanity.

The body of this entry has established four supports for this reading. The continuity with the 1986 International Peace Highway grounds the doctrine historically.

The Three Great Problems frame grounds it providentially as the third of a fixed triad. The demilitarization principle and the integration with the Abel UN ground it institutionally. The detailed engineering specifications and financial commitments ground it as a literal engineering rather than a symbolic-visionary proposal.

The strongest internal alternative reading available within Unification doctrine is the visionary-symbolic reading: that the Bering Strait Tunnel proposal is Rev. Moon’s poetic articulation of providential aspiration, using engineering language metaphorically to express the spiritual goal of universal peace, without doctrinally committing to literal construction.

This reading has support in the parallel teaching of Family Pledge Number Five, where the highway-paving image is explicitly spiritual, and in the practical fact that no Bering Strait construction has been undertaken in the two decades since the proclamation.

The evidence presented here favors the literal-engineering reading over the visionary-symbolic reading on three counts.

First, Rev. Moon repeatedly distinguishes the spiritual highway of love from the physical World Peace King Bridge and Tunnel, identifying the two as parallel but not identical and asserting the literal reality of both.

Second, the proposal includes detailed engineering specifications (eight to sixteen lanes, bridge or tunnel options, specified endpoint cities) that exceed what symbolic articulation would require.

Third, the integration with a concrete United Nations weapons-prohibition mechanism presupposes a literal road on which weapons would otherwise move; a symbolic highway needs no juridical demilitarization.

The argument does not entail that the project is on a near-term construction timeline. It entails only that the project is doctrinally literal — that the True Parents’ providential commitment includes the physical building of the road, and that the absence of present-day construction reflects providential timing rather than doctrinal symbolism.

The visionary-symbolic reading captures the spiritual significance the project carries; the literal-engineering reading captures the doctrinal commitment that distinguishes Rev. Moon’s late teaching from purely aspirational peace rhetoric.

Key Takeaway

• The Bering Strait Tunnel — formally the World Peace King Bridge and Tunnel — is Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s 2005 proposal for a bridge or undersea tunnel across the Bering Strait, completing a globe-encircling World Super-Highway from the Cape of Good Hope to Santiago and from London to New York.
• The proposal is the late-period completion of the International Peace Highway concept that Rev. Moon proclaimed in 1986 as the engineering counterpart to the spiritual opening of the gates of heaven and hell.
• The Bering Strait is named as the third of three Great Problems the True Parents must resolve —the Korean North-South division, and the Bering Strait — exhausting the categories of religious-civilizational, political-ideological, and geographic-geological rupture.
• The road would be governed by a United Nations resolution prohibiting the transport of weapons of war upon it, making the infrastructure itself a peace mechanism rather than merely a connection.
• The proposal includes concrete engineering specifications and personal financial commitments by Rev. Moon, indicating that the project is literal-engineering rather than visionary-symbolic.
• The doctrine integrates with the Abel UN as the demilitarization-administering body, the Pacific Rim doctrine as the providential geography, and the Holy Marriage Blessing as the lineage analogue of which the road is the geographic analogue.
• The BlessedFamily Family's responsibility for the project is differentiated by nation, with the four endpoint nations and key transit nations bearing specific providential obligations.
• The proposal closes the conceptual arc that began with the Korea-Japan undersea tunnel of the early 1980s and the International Peace Highway of 1986.

Related Questions

What is the relationship between the Bering Strait Tunnel and the International Peace Highway?

The Bering Strait Tunnel is the late-period completion of the International Peace Highway concept.

The original International Peace Highway, named publicly by Rev. Moon in 1986, envisioned a Eurasian highway with an undersea tunnel between Korea and Japan as its first link.

The Bering Strait Tunnel, proposed in 2005, extends this Eurasian highway across the last unbridged continental gap to the Americas, closing the global vehicular network into a single one-day living sphere.

Why is the Bering Strait one of the Three Great Problems?

The doctrine identifies three categories of fundamental human division that the True Parents must resolve: religious-civilizational, political-ideological (Korean DMZ), and geographic-geological (Bering Strait).

The Bering Strait is named as the geographic-geological member of the triad because the division it represents is not merely the work of political actors but a satanic exploitation of a continental separation that precedes politics and religion in the order of created givens. The proposal, therefore, addresses the deepest stratum of human division.

What is the demilitarization principle of the World Peace King Bridge and Tunnel?

The proposal includes a juridical-institutional principle: the road, once built, would be governed by a United Nations resolution prohibiting the transport of weapons of war upon it. Atomic weapons, weapon components, and military matériel of any kind would be denied passage.

The road is therefore not transportation-neutral; it is designed as a peace mechanism whose physical reality and legal regime together prevent the efficient movement of war across the continents it connects.

References

Cheon Seong Gyeong: Selections from the Speeches of Sun Myung Moon. 2003. 2nd ed.

Exposition of the Divine Principle. 1996. New York: Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity.

Moon, Sun Myung. February 1, 1986. In Cheon Seong Gyeong.

Moon, Sun Myung. May 15, 1988. In Cheon Seong Gyeong.

Moon, Sun Myung. November 2005. The Three Great Subject Partners Principle from the Viewpoint of God’s Providence