This paper explores the interplay between technology, labor, and race in the Eisenhower-Strauss Plan, an unrealized project that gained traction in US policy in the 1960s and 1970s. The plan was named after two US statesmen, former president Dwight D. Eisenhower and former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission Lewis L. Strauss. The Eisenhower-Strauss Plan followed the same logic as Atoms for Peace, launched in the 1950s, to share peaceful nuclear technology, as part of US diplomacy. The plan proposed building three nuclear reactors in the Middle East: two on the Israel-Egypt border, and one on the Israel-Jordan border, which would be used for the purposes of water desalination and electricity generation. By building and operating these nuclear reactors collectively, these two Arab states and Israel were expected to make peace. But the plan also included a return of Palestinian refugees who had been displaced after the Nakba in 1948. The architects of the plan embraced Zionist tropes of a ‘barren’ land, and suggested that through desalination, the land would then be made suitable to settle Palestinian refugees – a link that ultimately reduced Palestinian dispossession to the apolitical issue of availability of fertile land, rather than Israeli policy. The number of Palestinian refugees expected to return fluctuated in different iterations of the plan, ranging from thousands to up to a million; however, they all perceived Palestinian labor as a key component for the success of the project. Palestinian refugees were invoked in the plan as a source of cheap and flexible labor, which could be used to build the nuclear powerplants, but also pipelines, powerlines, reservoirs, and other related infrastructure. After the completion of the work, Palestinian refugees would then be ‘settled’ in a transformed landscape and expected to carry out agricultural work – “under conditions far superior to any life that they have ever experienced,” according to Strauss. In this research, I look at how policies depicting Palestinians as a source of flexible and mobile labor are deeply racialized, and how this plan for a US-led capitalist utopia underscores the intertwinement between technology, work, and race.