As with its overall foreign policy, the United States framed its atomic energy offerings as part of the global struggle between the “free world” and the communists, a division that masked the firm US military alignment with colonial powers. The United States continued that framing even as nations such as India and Ghana tried to forge a different path that associated atomic energy with the struggle for national or even racial liberation. The specter haunting Eisenhower and his successors was the emergence of a bloc of countries whose concerns were primarily racial and anti-colonial. Given the reality of racial segregation at home and the government’s close alliance with colonial powers of Europe, such a framing would put the United States on the side of the old colonial masters. American politicians utilized the promise of atomic energy to dim such perceptions amid numerous racially charged challenges in the 1950s and ’60s.