Against the Tide: Solar Desalination and the Promise of an Alternative Modernity

Across time and space, people have imagined using the sun to turn seawater into drinking water. After the Second World War, this idea—solar desalination—took material form as the quieter counterpart to conventional desalination and to hydraulic megaprojects like dams. Not because it lacked technical ambition, but because it operated at smaller scales, relied on ambient energy rather than heavy fuel or nuclear power, and produced few of the monumental structures through which modern states typically signaled progress. More broadly, desalination epitomized a Promethean belief in humanity’s power to transcend nature. Removing salt from seawater or brackish water came to represent a fix for one of humanity’s most enduring constraints: water scarcity.¹ Far from being purely a technical process or challenge, desalination also carried ideological weight. It became part of postwar development agendas that promised mastery over natural limits, embodying a modernist faith in technology not only supplementing but ultimately redesigning the hydrological cycle itself.

Dreams of Progress

At its core, desalination’s postwar appeal lay in a compelling narrative: turning the oceans into a new source of clean, accessible, and affordable freshwater. This vision diverged from traditional water infrastructure in two ways. Unlike large-scale irrigation, aqueducts, or storage systems like dams that merely captured existing supplies, desalination created entirely new synthetic water, produced by human hands. It extended availability beyond the limits of the hydrological cycle and carried an almost alchemical promise of turning salt into sustenance. Moreover, its potential for small-scale, decentralized deployment offered greater flexibility and efficiency beyond dams or aqueducts. Desalination seemed universal in both scope and reach, deployable almost everywhere. This portability—especially the ability to deliver water to riverless areas—fueled hopes of democratizing access and overcoming nature’s uneven resource distribution.²

In the postwar decades, desalination symbolized technological progress within Cold War agendas of development and modernization. Founded in 1955, the U.S. Office of Saline Water (OSW) was the first government-backed hub for desalination, tasked with developing cost-effective technologies for large-scale use.³ Its projects ranged from distillation and membrane trials in Texas, Arizona, and California to international ventures exploring nuclear-powered plants in Israel, the Soviet Union, and Mexico.⁴ Desalination was not solely a U.S. endeavor though.⁵ France, the Netherlands, and South Africa, for instance, initiated parallel programs, while international organizations such as the United Nations, UNESCO, and the World Health Organization promoted desalination as a response to water scarcity. By the early 1960s, countries such as Tunisia and Chile explored it as an experimental supplement to dominant hydraulic strategies including dams, irrigation schemes, and groundwater development. Across these settings, desalination aligned with postwar visions of state-led modernization and Cold War diplomacy.⁶

Beyond the Megaproject

Yet unlike dams or irrigation schemes, desalination has attracted a more uneven historiography. Much existing work has centered on its Cold War-era nuclear connections, particularly in U.S. foreign policy toward Israel and the wider Middle East, where desalination intersected prominently in debates over atomic power, regional security, and technological prestige.⁷ Scholars have also shown, how fossil-fueled desalination came to dominate in oil-rich Gulf states, while earlier engagements with steam-powered, solar, and even nuclear alternatives remained largely experimental.⁸ This emphasis reflected material conditions rather than scholarly neglect: access to abundant fossil energy and capital made large-scale desalination viable in oil-rich contexts in ways that were unavailable elsewhere. In regions without such energy reserves or financial surpluses, solar desalination appeared not as a marginal variant of fossil-fueled trajectories but as a materially and politically distinct proposition. What remains less examined are the small pilot projects that did not scale but nonetheless shaped development thinking. Recovering the history of solar desalination shifts the question from technical superiority to political choice, revealing how alternative development pathways were tested, constrained, and sidelined within postwar regimes of expertise, funding, and power—and to the futures that might have been.

Solar desalination emerged as a quieter alternative to nuclear and fossil-fueled systems.⁹ It lacked the scale and visibility of megaprojects but offered a different promise: a low-cost, decentralized, and renewable possibility for regions with abundant sunshine but little infrastructure. Solar stills mimicked the natural hydrological cycle, using solar heat to evaporate seawater and condense it into freshwater. Typically built as shallow basins covered with glass or plastic, they produced modest but steady outputs—measured in thousands rather than millions of gallons per day.¹⁰ Though less productive and slower in output than industrial plants, stills were cheaper to build, easier to maintain, and well-suited to off-grid areas where centralized solutions were either impractical or uneconomical. Built from locally sourced materials like cement, they reduced dependence on imported technology and highlighted their practical, adaptable design. In contrast to nuclear desalination’s high-modernist ideals, solar desalination embodied what historian Elizabeth Chatterjee calls “low modernism:” frugal, adaptable, and locally autonomous.¹¹ Rather than democratizing water universally, solar desalination redistributed technological possibility—making limited but reliable freshwater attainable where large systems were politically, economically, or logistically out of reach.¹²

USAID’s Turn to Solar Desalination

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) kept its initial involvement in the wider desalting effort to a minimum.¹³ The technology was costly, experimental, and difficult to prove cost-effective, particularly in cases where conventional water sources were cheaper. Moreover, a statutory provision required projects to be “economically sound” to qualify for USAID assistance.¹⁴ Here lay the crux: USAID simply could not justify support for seemingly “uneconomical projects,” hesitating to invest in desalination without clear financial returns or scalability.¹⁵ That changed in 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson announced the launch of the Water for Peace initiative at the First International Symposium on Water Desalination. The goal of this ambitious program was to address global water insecurity through technical cooperation and, as Johnson put it, to bring ”water for all humanity.”¹⁶ Suddenly, USAID had a new mandate. While still unable to directly fund plants, it could provide technical assistance through feasibility studies and pilot projects. Any subsequent construction funding was reserved for “unusual cases.”¹⁷ This created an opening for solar desalination which USAID framed in humanitarian and strategic terms, to strengthen alliances, promote U.S. technological leadership, and secure markets in the Global South.¹⁸

To assess needs, USAID sent a questionnaire to 23 “selected missions” to gauge “the severity of water problems” and the feasibility of desalting as an “alternative source.”¹⁹ Based on the responses, it planned to dispatch teams under “promises of AID financing and U.S. development cooperation.”²⁰ This would lay the groundwork for pilot projects in regions deemed most urgent. At the same time, USAID explored the specific advantages of solar desalination, hoping to “mount its own desalting offensive against some of the global water ills” by promoting it as safe, reliable, and politically preferable.²¹ Solar stills, it noted, produced water free of both salt and bacteria, and could function even during cloudy or rainy periods. While “no panacea,” they offered water at roughly $2-3 per 1,000 U.S. gallons, presenting a small-scale, decentralized option aligned with development strategies that favored technical self-reliance over capital-intensive megaprojects.²²

A central figure in this turn was Edgar E. Cadwallader, a veteran distillation expert brought in from the OSW. Appointed in 1966 to head USAID’s new Chemical Engineering Division, Cadwallader became a strong advocate for solar desalination.²³ The approach was framed in humanitarian and strategic terms: no fuel costs, independence from fossil fuels, clean water for remote regions, and freedom from nuclear’s geopolitical baggage. Although more expensive than conventional sources, water produced through solar distillation was often cheaper than trucking supplies or constructing long pipelines in isolated areas. Cadwallader’s financing model drew on U.S. counterpart funds—local currency accounts generated from U.S. commodity sales abroad—and required host governments to supply land, labor, and materials, reducing direct U.S. spending while ensuring local buy-in under Johnson’s “self-help” foreign aid philosophy.²⁴ As an industry newsletter noted, “business with U.S. firms would be contracted for between the foreign nations and private business, not between AID and industry.”²⁵

Cadwallader brought industry into the effort by inviting “state of the art” tenders from major U.S. firms, with Kaiser Engineers ultimately winning and producing a detailed manual for evaluating projects eligible for U.S. government assistance.²⁶ Completed in Spring 1967, it outlined criteria for determining when desalination constituted “the optimum approach,” echoing the 1964 UN Desalination Survey’s insistence that desalination be assessed alongside other water-supply options rather than treated as a standalone solution.²⁷ The manual prescribed a staged process of feasibility studies, detailed technical and economic assessments, and, for selected cases, design and construction plans tied to requests for USAID assistance.²⁸ Kaiser’s framework translated desalination into a more concrete technocratic pathway than the aspirational Water for Peace program, which articulated expansive goals but offered fewer mechanisms for sustained deployment.

Experiment on the Makran Coast

USAID’s first attempt to implement its solar development program took shape in the remote fishing town of Gwadar along Pakistan’s arid Makran coast, west of Karachi on the Arabian Sea and stretching into what is now Balochistan near the Iranian border.²⁹ Historically, Gwadar’s economy relied on abundant salt, which supported fish curing and export in the late nineteenth century.³⁰ By the 1960s, however, new fish-freezing and packing facilities signaled a shift toward industrial production that required a reliable freshwater supply. The region’s long droughts and sudden storms—typical of arid environments but at odds with modernist planning ideals of stability and control—were compounded by waterlogging and salinity, already documented by the International Development Association in the early 1960s and flagged by the UN Desalination Survey in 1964.³¹ Residents depended largely on brackish dune water costing about 125 rupees (roughly $25) per 1,000 U.S. gallons, while freshwater for industrial use had to be trucked 300 miles from Karachi at a roughly 500 rupees (about $100) per 1,000 U.S. gallons.³²

Within this context, Gwadar became a natural testing ground: a coastal settlement with saline soils, no rivers, and minimal infrastructure. Conventional alternatives such as pipelines or dams were prohibitively expensive and rainfall-dependent, while nuclear or fossil-fueled plants demanded resources far beyond local means. As a Pakistani official noted at the Water for Peace Conference in 1967, “It appears that there is hardly an alternative to desalination to meet the freshwater requirements of the Makran fishing ports” like Gwadar.³³ The UN desalting survey had reached a similar conclusion earlier in the decade, finding that “[t]he construction of stationary water conversion plants for the Makran coast […] would provide a practical solution to present shortages,” particularly with freshwater demand expected to rise by more than 1200 percent by 1970.³⁴ Moreover, the potential to combine salt production with seawater desalting promised additional benefits for the fisheries sector—whose $3 million in exports could “double and even treple” with a stable freshwater supply.³⁵ Estimates for the freshwater produced by the proposed solar desalting plant—costing just 16-24 rupees (about $3-5) per 1,000 gallons over a 20-year lifespan—further strengthened this optimism.³⁶

With “scarcely no alternative” available and studies deeming fossil-fired plants and dual-purpose nuclear installations infeasible, the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) opted for a solar desalting plant at Gwadar.³⁷ With USAID’s backing, U.S. solar engineer George O.G. Löf assessed the site and proposed a multi-basin solar still made of concrete and glass.³⁸ Pakistan supplied land, labor, and materials, while USAID provided technical guidance under its “own inhouse Water For Peace effort”—a project that, as one industry newsletter observed, would “unquestionably” yield political benefits for the Pakistani government.³⁹ PAEC completed the plant in 1969 with a capacity of 15,000 imperial gallons per day (about 18,000 U.S. gallons), though a 1970 report noted that construction began in 1968 after PAEC secured funding, without specifying USAID support.⁴⁰ USAID likely withdrew after late-1967 U.S. budget cuts linked to Vietnam War spending and shifting aid priorities, a retrenchment later reinforced by the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo.⁴¹

Even so, Gwadar exemplified the broader U.S. development model: U.S. firms supplied equipment and expertise, while local authorities provided land and labor. Situated in water-scarce Balochistan and near emerging cement resources, it fit the profile of the arid, cement-producing regions for which solar desalination appeared especially suited. For U.S. firms, such projects also offered export opportunities.⁴² Solar desalination thus endured less as a dominant infrastructural model than as an alternative imaginary—one that revealed how development pathways were shaped not only by technical feasibility but by which visions of modernity proved scalable, legible, and politically compelling.

Although Gwadar itself stalled, interest in solar desalination did not vanish. USAID carried its lessons forward through commissioned reviews in the late 1970s built on trials like Gwadar to assess costs, materials, and performance for small-scale applications, and a 1980 desalination manual codified these findings by placing solar distillation alongside thermal and membrane processes as a decentralized, low-energy option.⁴³ Interest also resurfaced during the 1970s oil crises, when fuel shortages prompted governments, aid agencies, and research institutes to revisit renewable alternatives. In this sense, Gwadar helped clarify how solar desalination was understood as technically plausible within postwar development thinking while simultaneously exposing the political, economic, and energetic constraints that prevented its wider adoption. Rather than demonstrating viability in a modern sense, projects like Gwadar are best understood as early, ultimately unsuccessful pilot efforts. They functioned as false starts that made solar desalination imaginable within development thinking long before the infrastructural, financial, and energy conditions existed to sustain it as scale.⁴⁴

A Gentler Modernity

In the postwar decades, desalination became a site where competing visions of modernity briefly coexisted. Nuclear-powered schemes embodied high-modernist ideas of scale, control, and spectacle, while solar desalination articulated a different possibility—one rooted in frugality, adaptability, and postcolonial autonomy. This alternative modernity did not stand outside postwar modernization itself. Rather, it emerged within the same research, development, and planning frameworks, reconfiguring modernity around different assumptions of scale, energy use, and infrastructural governance rather than rejecting modernization outright. In this historical moment, solar desalination functioned less a rival technology than as a ideological challenge to prevailing assumptions about progress—namely that modern infrastructure had to be large, capital-intensive, and state-driven. It reframed development as something potentially everyday and locally grounded rather than monumental and centralized.

The alternative visions sat uneasily alongside dominant development agendas that favored large-scale projects such as nuclear desalination and megadams. In the mid-twentieth century, when both solar energy and desalination technologies remained technically immature, solar distillation was often treated as provisional or auxiliary rather than transformative. Its limited scale, modest output, and lack of political spectacle made it less legible within institutions oriented towards demonstrable capacity, rapid scaling, and geopolitical visibility. In this context, solar desalination was frequently characterized as a stopgap or experimental pathway and sidelined as a “technological cul-de-sac,” even as fossil-fueled systems expanded where abundant energy and capital made them viable.⁴⁵

Seen in this light, the history of solar desalination is about more than water supply. It reveals how infrastructural futures were shaped by the interaction of technical limits, energy regimes, institutional priorities, and geopolitical circumstance. The postwar marginalization of solar desalination was not simply a verdict on its feasibility, but a reflection of which development models appeared scalable, fundable, and politically compelling at the time. Solar desalination thus stands as a historically situated alternative modernity: one that did not prevail in the decades that followed, but whose underlying logic has resurfaced under very different technological, ecological, and political conditions.⁴⁶ These later outcomes do not invalidate early solar experiments but instead highlight how their constraints were historically contingent rather than intrinsic. Its legacy lies less in what it achieved than in what it made imaginable during a formative moment in global development thinking.

1. Only about 3 percent of the earth’s water is fresh, and less than 0.5 percent is readily accessible for human use, see e.g. “The Three Percent,” NASA (August 14, 2014[↩]
2. Elizabeth Hameeteman, “Pipe Parity: Desalination, Development, and the Global Quest for Water in the 1950s and 1960s” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 2022), 5-7; and “Pipe Dreams: Technological Utopianism and the Global Pursuit of Desalination for Development in the 1960s,” Technology & Culture 67, no. 1 (January 2026): 93-118.[↩]
3. In 1952, U.S. Congress authorized a research and development program in saline water conversion, which was institutionalized in 1955 with the creation of the OSW, see “Amending the Act of July 3, 1952 […],” Conference Report No. 861 (June 20, 1955); Amendments to the Saline Water Conversion Act, 69 Stat. 198 (June 29, 1955).[↩]
4. See e.g. “Fresh Water With Nuclear Power,” IAEA Bulletin 8, no. 1 (March 1966), 17; Kaiser Engineers, “Engineering Feasibility and Economic Study of Dual-Purpose Electric Power-Water Desalting Plant for Israel: Prepared for United States-Israel Joint Board,” Report No. 66-1-RE (January 1966), Clearinghouse for Federal Scientific and Technical Information of the U.S. Department of Commerce; Saline Water Demonstration Plant Act, Public Law 85-883 (September 2, 1958); “U.S., Soviet Sign Desalting Accord,” The New York Times (November 19, 1964), TimesMachine. U.S. Department of the Interior, “Saline Water Conversion Report for 1958” (January 1959) 2, 23-24, 80, 86; and “Saline Water Conversion Report for 1959” (January 1960), I, HathiTrust.[↩]
5. See e.g. Georges Dumesnil, “Saline Water Conversion Research in the World,” in NAS – NRC, “Saline Water Conversion: Proceedings of a Symposium, 4-6 November 1957,” Publication 568 (1958), 3-11, NAS – NRC Library; United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, “Salinity Problems in the Arid Zones: Proceedings of the Teheran Symposium, Arid Zone Research – XIV” (1960), UNESCO Digital Library.[↩]
6. Hameeteman, “Pipe Parity;” and “Pipe Dreams.”[↩]
7. Kurkpatrick Dorsey, “Trickling Off Into the Desert: The Rise and Fall of Nuclear-Powered Desalination for Agriculture in the Middle East” (Presentation, Annual Meeting of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Philadelphia, PA, 2018); Stefan Guth, “From Close Call to Close Contacts: Transsystemic Techno-Diplomacy and Cooperation in the Civilian Uses of Nuclear Power, 1963–79,” Cold War History (online, 2020): 1-18; and “Oasis of the Future: The Nuclear City of Shevchenko/Aqtau, 1959–2019,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 66, no. 1 (March 2018): 93-123; Jacob Darwin Hamblin, “Water, Blood, and the Nuclear Club,” in The Wretched Atom: America’s Global Gamble with Peaceful Nuclear Energy (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2021), 165-188; and “An American Miracle in the Desert: Environmental Crisis and Nuclear-Powered Desalination in the Middle East,” in Nature and the Iron Curtain: Environmental Policy and Social Movements in Communist and Capitalist Countries, 1945–1990, ed. Astrid Mignon Kirchhoff and J.R. McNeill (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), 205-218; Zach Levey, “The United States, Israel, and Nuclear Desalination: 1964–1968,” Diplomatic History 39, no. 5 (November 2015): 904-925; James Lockhart, “The Frei Administration,” in Chile, the CIA and the Cold War: A Transatlantic Perspective (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 126-166; and “International Cooperation During the Cold War: British Interest in Chile’s Early Nuclear History, 1955-1970,” in Britain and the Growth of US Hegemony in Twentieth-Century Latin America: Competition, Cooperation and Coexistence, ed. Thomas C. Mills and Rory M. Miller (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 181-202.[↩]
8. Barak, On. “Water,” in Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization (Berkely, CA: University of California Press, 2020), 24-52; Natalie Koch, “Desal,” in Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia (New York, NY: Verso Books, 2023), 99-130; M. Christopher Low, “Ottoman Infrastructures of the Saudi-Hydro-State: The Technopolitics of Pilgrimage and Potable Water in the Hijaz,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 57, no. 4 (October 2015): 942-974; “Desert Dreams of Drinking the Sea, Consumed by the Cold: Transnational Flows of Desalination and Energy from the Pacific to the Persian Gulf,” Environment and History 26, no. 2 (May 2020): 145-174; and “The Water Prince: Muhammed AlFaisal’s Legacy,” Dirasat 76 (September 2025) [↩]
9. “Quiet” here refers not only to solar desalination’s small physical footprint of solar desalination but also to its limited political visibility: unlike nuclear plants or megadams, solar stills required no massive capital outlays, foreign fuel supplies, or geopolitical bargaining.[↩]
10. Such volumes were insufficient for large cities of industrial agriculture, but well suited for small coastal towns, fishing communities, construction camps, and other off-grid users whose needs fell outside centralized supply networks.[↩]
11. Elizabeth Chatterjee, “The Poor Woman’s Energy: Low-Modernist Solar Technologies and International Development, 1878-1966,” Journal of Global History 18, no. 3 (2023), 4.[↩]
12. Mary Bridges, “The Infrastructural Turn in Historical Scholarship,” Modern American History 6, no. 1 (March 2023): 103-120[↩]
13. By this point, U.S. aid funding for desalting had been granted only twice.  In 1959, USAID’s predecessor, the U.S. International Cooperation Administration, financed feasibility studies for a plant to convert brackish water on Tunisia’s island of Djerba and the nearby Zarzis peninsula, see e.g. Memorandum to General Graham J. Parsons [U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs] from General Andrew J. Goodpaster [White House Staff Secretary] (December 21, 1959), Gale Primary Sources, U.S. Declassified Documents Online; Robert C. Vorhis, “Hydrogeology of the Zarzis Area, Tunisia,” U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 59-122 (1959); U.S. Geological Survey, “Historical Review of the International Water-Resources Program of the U.S. Geological Survey 1940-70,” 60-61, USGS Publications Warehouse[↩]
14. USAID, Office of Program Coordination, “Principles of Foreign Economic Assistance” (1963), 19-20; and Office of Engineering, “Feasibility Studies, Economic and Technical Soundness Analysis, Capital Projects” (October 1, 1964), iii-v, HathiTrust; Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (Public Law 87-195), Title II, Section 201(b) (Development Loans); and Title II, Section 211(a)(3) (Development Grants and Technical Cooperation) [↩]
15. A February 1965 document noted that USAID held authority to support desalting activity abroad through technical cooperation, development grants, loans, investment guarantees, and research. The main obstacle, however, lay in the absence of a clear policy framework for such activities. Still, the report suggested that “USAID would give sympathetic consideration to a variety of activities in the desalting areas,” provided they aligned wit national development priorities and broader aid strategies. It further emphasized that USAID was “likely to give desalting high priority” in research and technical cooperation, see Interdepartmental Committee on Foreign Desalting Programs, “Potential for AID Activities” (February 15, 1965), Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum (further: LBJ Library), Papers of Lyndon Baynes Johnson (further: Papers of LBJ), National Security File, Files of Charles E. Johnson, Box 30, Committee on Foreign Desalting Programs [2 of 2][↩]
16. “No international gathering ever met anywhere for a more important purpose,” Johnson declared at the Desalination Symposium. “If science can unlock the door to an unlimited supply of pure and drinkable water, I think it will be an event in human history as significant as the harnessing of the atom,” see Johnson, “Remarks to the Delegates to the First International Symposium on Water Desalination” (October 7, 1965), The American Presidency Project, UC Santa Barbara Library. See also: “President Johnson Called for Creation of a Cooperative Fund by All Nations,” Water Desalination Report 1, no. 35 (October 14, 1965), 2-3.[↩]
17. Draft Airgram to Embassy and USAID in Selected Developing Countries from State and AID (October 21, 1966), LBJ Library, Papers of LBJ, National Security File, Files of Charles E. Johnson, Box 30, Committee on Foreign Desalting Programs [1 of 2]; “Water Desalination Background Information,” 7, attachment to CA-7012 Circular Airgram to All Diplomatic Posts from State and AID (January 11, 1966), National Archives and Records Administration (further: NARA), RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1964-66, Box 682, E 11-3 1-1-66; also LBJ Library, Papers of LBJ, National Security File, Files of Robert W. Komer, Box 19, Desalinization – 1965-1966 (Mar.) [↩]
18. As global interest in desalination grew, the U.S. Department of State and USAID expected a surge in related inquiries. To prepare, they circulated an information packet to all diplomatic missions in January 1966, outlining the state of desalting technology, its economic dimensions, and initial policy guidance, see “Water Desalination Background Information,” 7, attachment to CA-7012 Circular Airgram to All Diplomatic Posts from State and AID (January 11, 1966), NARA, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1964-66, Box 682, E 11-3 1-1-66; also LBJ Library, Papers of LBJ, National Security File, Files of Robert W. Komer, Box 19, Desalinization – 1965-1966 (Mar.). See also: “Desalting Plant Construction is Also in for a Boost from State Dept.,” Water Desalination Report 2, no. 2 (January 13, 1966), 2.[↩]
19. XA-306 Circular Airgram from State and AID (August 5, 1966), NARA, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1964-66, Box 682, E 11-3 7-1-66; State and AID sent this airgram to U.S. missions in Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cyprus, Ecuador, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Jordan, Libya, Kenya, Madagascar, Morocco, Mauritania, Pakistan, Peru, Somalia, Sudan, Tunisia, Turkey, and Venezuela. See also: Draft Airgram to Embassy and USAID in Selected Developing Countries from State and AID (October 21, 1966).[↩]
20. “New Water Resources-Desalting Assistance Program Begins at AID” and “Water Teams,” Water Desalination Report 2, no. 37 (September 22, 1966), 1.[↩]
21. Solar stills were promoted as especially compatible with the Johnson administration’s emphasis on self-help and partnership: they avoided the political sensitivities of nuclear plants, reduced dependence on imported fuels, and relied on local labor and materials rather than permanent U.S. financial commitments, see e.g. “Aid to Push for Solar Desalting Projects,” Water Desalination Report 3, no. 13 (March 30, 1967), 1. See also: Peter E. Glaser, “Solar Energy—An Alternative Source for Power Generation,” Futures 1, no. 4 (June 1969): 304-313.[↩]
22. USAID, Office of Engineering, “The Sun, The Sea, and Fresh Water – Solar Distillation Technology” (November 1966), 8, 11-13; Edgar E. Cadwallader, “Family Size Solar Stills” (January 1967), USAID Development Experience Clearinghouse. See also: “Financing,” Water Desalination Report 3, no. 13 (March 30, 1967), 1.[↩]
23. “Desalting Plant Construction is Also in for a Boost from State Dept.,” Water Desalination Report 2, no. 2 (January 13, 1966), 2.[↩]
24. USAID, “The Sun, The Sea, and Fresh Water,” 11.[↩]
25. “Industry Participation,” Water Desalination Report 3, no. 13 (March 30, 1967), 1-2.[↩]
26. “20 Firms Complete for Aid Desalting State-of-Art Studies,” Water Desalination Report 2, no. 16 (April 21, 1966), 1. The Kaiser manuel appeared just as U.S.-led solar desalination experiments in Puerto Peñasco and Abu Dhabi were gaining international attention while also exposing the technical fragility, energy demands, and political contingencies of solar-driven systems that still relied on diesel backup, see Koch, “Desal.”[↩]
27. In practice, these alternatives included brackish groundwater extraction, rainwater harvesting, water trucking, pipeline extensions, small-scale storage, and limited well development—options often unreliable, prohibitively expensive, or environmentally constrained in remote coastal and desert regions. See Kaiser Engineers, “A Manual on Water Desalination, Volume One—Technology” (April 1967), II/1, USAID Development Experience Clearinghouse; “Solution of Water Shortage Problems” and “The Water Development Plan,” in Kaiser Engineers, “A Manual on Water Desalination, Volume Two—Economics” (April 1967), VIII/1-VIII/4, IX/1-IX/17, USAID Development Experience Clearinghouse; United Nations, “Water Desalination in Developing Countries” (1964), 11, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University.[↩]
28. “Selection of Most Promising Solution” and “Detailed Feasibility Study of Selected Solution,” in ibid., X/1-X/30, XI/1-XI/2.[↩]
29. Until its transfer from Oman to Pakistan in 1958, Gwadar belonged to an Omani-controlled coastal world that postwar planners understood as closely connected to the Trucial States and the wider Arabian Sea region, see Koch, Arid Empire.[↩]
30. Francis Day, “The Fisheries of India,” Journal of the Society of Arts 31, no. 1608 (May 4, 1883): 625.[↩]
31. Ismat Kamal, “Prospects of Desalination for Solving Water Problems on the Makran Coast,” in Water for Peace: International Conference on Water for Peace, May 23 – 31, 1967, Vol. 6 Planning and Developing Programs (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968), 784; International Development Association, “Report and Recommendations of the President to the Executive Directors on a Proposed Credit to the Republic of Pakistan for the Khairpur Ground Water and Salinity Control Project,” Report No. P-283 (June 21, 1962), World Bank Documents & Reports; UN, “Water Desalination in Developing Countries,” 218-221.[↩]
32. “Cost Sharing,” Water Desalination Report 3, no. 29 (July 20, 1967), 2-3[↩]
33. Kamal, “Prospects of Desalination for Solving Water Problems on the Makran Coast,” 784-786.[↩]
34. Estimates projected freshwater demand to increase from 110 m³ (about 29,000 U.S. gallons) to 1460 m³ (about 385,700 U.S. gallons) by 1970, see UN, “Water Desalination in Developing Countries,” 28, 221.[↩]
35. “Cost Sharing,” 2.[↩]
36. R.H. Niaz, “Gwadar Solar Desalination Project,” The Nucleus 5, no. 1-2 (January-June 1968): 41.[↩]
37. Ibid., 38; “No Alternative,” Water Desalination Report 3, no. 29 (July 20, 1967), 3.[↩]
38. Ismat Kamal, “Prospects of Desalination of Sea Water on the Makran Coast (West Pakistan),” Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (April 1967); Niaz, “Gwadar Solar Desalination Project,” 40-41. See also: Institute of Public Health Engineering and Research, “Public Water Supplies in Pakistan: Proceedings of a National Symposium Held in November 1973” (1979), 63, Resources Library, IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre (further: IRC WASH) [↩]
39. “Cost Sharing,” 3; “A 25,000 Solar Still for West Pakistan’s Extremely Dry Makran Coast,” Water Desalination Report 3, no. 29 (July 20, 1967), 1-2; A. Delyannis, “The Gwadar, Pakistan, Solar Distillation Plant,” presented at Solar Energy Society Meeting, Palo Alto, California, October 1968.[↩]
40. Niaz, “Gwadar Solar Desalination Project,” 38, 40. See also: Institute of Public Health Engineering and Research, “Public Water Supplies in Pakistan: Proceedings of a National Symposium Held in November 1973” (1979), 63, IRC WASH; George O.G. Löf et al, “Manual on Solar Distillation of Saline Water,” OSW Research and Development Report No. 546 (April 1970), 22, HathiTrust.[↩]
41. These retrenchment, compounded by the geopolitical realignments after the Six-Day War and the Arab Oil Embargo, reshaped the political economy of energy, water, and development assistance and accelerated the concentration of desalination investment in oil-rich states, see e.g. Low, “Desert Dreams of Drinking the Sea, Consumed by the Cold.”[↩]
42. In addition to reducing the OSW’s budget to $24,556,000 for Fiscal Year 1969, U.S. Congress stipulated that “no new commitments shall be made […] for cooperation with public or private agencies in foreign countries which require the expenditure of funds appropriated pursuant to this Act […],” see S. 2912, Public Law 90-297 (April 29, 1968). This restriction reflected President Johnson’s waning interest in the OSW program. As one industry newsletter observed in January 1968, “The yr. ahead may be the yr. of trial and torment for desalting […] Most vexing of problems, one soon draping all others in darker shrouds, is desalting’s apparent loss of LBJ’s personal interest,” see “Challenge, Trial, Rewards for Desalting Business in 1968,” Water Desalination Report 4, no. 1 (January 4, 1968), 1. In this respect, solar desalination in Pakistan shared the fate of parallel U.S. domestic experiments, which likewise stalled as federal support waned. See also: “The House of Representatives Passed in a Hurry OSW and AEC Budgets,” Water Desalination Report 4, no. 15 (April 11, 1968), 1-2; “OSW’s $24,556,000 Fiscal 1969 Budget Authorization Bill is at the White House,” Water Desalination Report 4, no. 18 (May 2, 1968), 2; “Desalting Vacuum,” Water Desalination Report 4, no. 19 (May 9, 1968), 1; “Desalting Thin,” Water Desalination Report 5, no. 4 (January 23, 1969), 1. Moreover, the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo further reinforced this divergence by narrowing the geography of desalination development and sidelining solar approaches that lacked both capital and energy security. Corporate attention increasingly shifted toward oil-rich Gulf markets, where capital, fuel, and political backing favored large-scale, energy-intensive systems, see Low, “Desert Dreams of Drinking the Sea, Consumed by the Cold.”[↩]
43. See e.g. Dunham, Daniel C., “Fresh Water from the Sun: Family-Sized Solar Still Technology – A Review and Analysis” (August 1978); CH2M Hill International Corporation, “The U.S.A.I.D. Desalination Manual” (August 1980), IRC WASH.[↩]
44. For large-scale solar-powered desalination projects that only became feasible decades later—under radically different energy, financial, and technological conditions—see developments in Abu Dhabi (2016), Khafji, Saudi Arabia (2018), and Witsand, South Africa (2018). These projects underscore how early postwar experiments like Gwadar anticipated futures that could not yet be realized.[↩]
45. Chatterjee, “The Poor Woman’s Energy,” 3.[↩]
46. Subsequent developments—including large-scale solar desalination projects in the Gulf and the inauguration of a major desalination plant in Gwadar in 2023—underscore how profoundly the technical, financial, and geopolitical conditions of desalination have changed since the postwar period[↩]