On the summer of 1964, US President Lyndon Johnson called for developing “an aggressive and imaginative program” to advance progress in large-scale desalting of sea water. Those adjectives pointed to the sense of urgency and purpose characterizing the modernization projects of the era, and call attention to what would become a pet-development program of Johnson’s presidency, namely, the Water for Peace initiative. One of the most innovative proposals in this realm included the use of atomic energy for water desalination. In this chapter, we will focus on the first international project for a dual nuclear power desalination plant, which was supposed to be built in the Gulf of California, in the border between the United States and Mexico with help from the International Atomic Energy Agency. Both Atoms for Peace and Water for Peace drew on powerful metaphors for a possible future: those of “novel” technologies to be tamed for peaceful purposes and those of a “thirsty world.” Our interest, however, goes beyond the analysis of discourse and propaganda. As our chapter shows, the early history of this project exhibits the overpromises of development and modernization, the underperformance of technologies and economic planning, and the political resistances to technological solutions to perceived social and economic problems.