At 7:00 a.m. on 29 August 1949 a plutonium bomb on a steel tower exploded on the steppe of Kazakhstan. RDS-1 ended the American atomic monopoly four years after Hiroshima, and the people who built it had been told what failure would cost.
For decades the Soviet Union sprayed anthrax, plague and tularemia over animals tied to stakes on a remote island in the Aral Sea. Then the sea drained away, the island joined the mainland, and the pits where the leftover spores were buried became an international problem.
In 1997 a 45-metre Gulliver was laid out on a hillside below Mount Fuji, tied down by Lilliputians, and four years later the park was dead. The bank behind it had collapsed, and the giant stayed where he lay for six more years.
Okunoshima is famous for the hundreds of rabbits that greet every ferry, but from 1929 to 1945 it was a secret island where the Imperial Japanese Army made thousands of tons of poison gas.
In 1961 a Japanese showman built his own Disneyland in Nara, complete with a castle, a Matterhorn and a Main Street. For forty-five years it thrilled families, then it sat empty and overgrown for a decade before the bulldozers arrived.
In 1998 a developer announced the largest amusement park in Asia in a village north-west of Beijing. A fairy-tale castle went up, and then everything stopped. Farmers planted corn among the ruins until the site was torn down in 2013.
Hashima is a six-hectare rock off Nagasaki that held 5,259 people at its 1959 peak, packed into concrete apartment blocks around an undersea coal mine. Mitsubishi closed the mine in January 1974 and the island was emptied by April. It is now a World Heritage site, and its wartime forced-labour history is still disputed.
Two launch pads on the Kazakh steppe were built in the 1960s for the N1, the Soviet answer to the Saturn V. The N1 failed on all four flights, and the second one destroyed its own pad. The pads were later rebuilt for Energia and the Buran shuttle, which flew once in 1988.
On the steppe of eastern Kazakhstan the Soviet Union fired its first atomic bomb in 1949 and went on to test more than 450 nuclear devices over 40 years, in an area chosen because Lavrentiy Beria called it uninhabited. It was closed in 1991, and a 17-year operation was needed to secure the plutonium left behind.
