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Beginning in the 1930s, the Bureau of Reclamation received increasing requests from abroad for technical assistance, and a great deal of this support became focused on the activities of a small group of notable personages. A key section of this chapter examines the use of technical assistance by the US government as a tool of empire building during the pre-development era through an examination of the life and work of John L. (“Jack”) Savage. Fresh from pioneering efforts as Chief Design Engineer on the Hoover Dam in the western United States, Savage served in his later career as an engineering consultant for numerous foreign governments. Savage’s consultancies and travels were approved and carefully monitored by US foreign policy officials, in particular in China during the critical years of 1943-1945. Using Savage’s experiences as a template, the Bureau of Reclamation launched its Foreign Activities Office in 1950 as a response to Truman’s call to aid the world’s underdeveloped regions. Savage embodied what would later become a familiar icon of the post-World War II era—the ‘development expert’ offering crucial technical advice to newly independent nation-states in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The third chapter describes the period when the US State Department increasingly conceived dams and river basin development as vehicles of technical assistance that, if used strategically, would demonstrate to current and would-be allies in the underdeveloped regions of Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America the superiority of American developmental and political approaches vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. An important dimension of the Bureau’s institutionalization within the sphere of foreign policy concerned debates over how economic and technical assistance might enhance the capacity of American business interests to increase their global influence and investment opportunities. The central case study of this chapter is the Litani Project in Lebanon. Initiated in 1951, the Litani program was the Bureau’s first intensive foray into overseas technical assistance. The Bureau’s experiences in the Litani basin established an administrative and technological model of river basin planning that subsequent initiatives would follow, but also reflect the numerous organizational and environmental difficulties that harried nearly every major Bureau investigation in the tricontinental world. A key outcome of the Litani and similar Bureau initiatives was the creation of the “modern” river basin, which combined resource development through dam construction with more ambitious schemes of social engineering.

Along with the Litani River initiative, the Bureau’s other major international effort of the 1950s was the Blue Nile investigation in Ethiopia. This chapter begins with a discussion of the rapidly growing scope of the Bureau’s activities throughout the 1950s and 1960s and the role of technical assistance in expanding the liberal capitalist ideals of the American state. The Bureau’s crucial role in Ethiopia’s water resource development strategies stretched over a nearly two-decade period from 1951 to the late 1960s. Like the Litani experience, the Bureau’s engagement with the Blue Nile basin exhibited a mingling of geopolitics, development aid and technical assistance. This chapter highlights the Bureau’s initial experiences with river basin planning in Ethiopia, the regional geopolitical considerations of concern to US officials, Ethiopian dissatisfactions with development of the Blue Nile, and, finally, the actual outcome of the Bureau’s investigations. The response of the Ethiopian government, in particular that of Haile Selassie, to the Bureau’s proposed development of the Blue Nile is particularly salient given the emperor’s politically astute arguments for accelerated and more expansive American assistance.

Chapter Five draws together threads presented in previous chapters (e.g., the technological and symbolic facets of large dams and river basin planning approaches, the tensions between technical expertise and geopolitical aims) and examines them using the case of the Mekong Project, the Bureau’s most intensive and longest engagement in international development. The Lower Mekong Basin, shared by the mainland Southeast Asia states of Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Viet Nam, became the focus of intense development interest beginning in the 1950s. The period from the creation of the Mekong Committee in 1957 until the United States’ disengagement from Mekong development planning in 1975 was characterized by a combination of geopolitical imaginings and technological optimism that drove the proliferation of large dams and the idea of river basin development in mainland Southeast Asia. A key element in this story is the Pa Mong dam project, the focus of over a decade of study by Bureau engineers and experts and millions of dollars of U.S. economic assistance that was never actually built. Pa Mong became the lynchpin for development of the entire Mekong basin, and in effect helped generate an imagined geography of the Mekong region that resonates with current water development efforts.

This chapter examines the history of American river development through one of its major proponents, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. On September 11, 1936, Hoover Dam began generating electricity. Many “experts” had predicted that a dam of such monstrous dimensions could not be built; some thought it would collapse of its own immense weight. Thanks to American ingenuity, courtesy of the Bureau of Reclamation, Hoover Dam became a reality. In regard to public policy, there was a strong move to use “watery science” to irrigate vast stretches of land in the American West. But the science was only part of the irrigation phenomenon in 1900. The other part was a vast scheme of social engineering that was both grandiose and far-reaching. The construction of Hoover Dam, Grand Coulee Dam, and other projects launched the Bureau into a period of major expansion and construction. Other major Bureau projects include the Central Utah Project and the Central Arizona Project (CAP), the Garrison Diversion in North Dakota, and two of the five “Aspinall” projects in Colorado.

This chapter examines efforts to use weather control techniques for domestic purposes and discusses three such cases. Project Skyfire, a US Forest Service project, sought to reduce lightning strikes, the number of lightning-caused fires, and the cost of suppressing them. It also sought to trigger rainfall to put out fires in hard-to-reach terrain and to reduce the cost of fire suppression. Bureau of Reclamation’s Project Skywater sought to tap water from the atmosphere to fill its reservoirs that fed irrigation and hydroelectric power systems. Project Stormfury, a combined US Weather Bureau, Navy, and Air Force project, sought to snuff out hurricanes while they were small, or, alternatively to steer the larger ones away from populated areas.