In July 1946 the United States set off two atomic bombs over a lagoon full of warships. The first missed its target, the second turned the lagoon radioactive, and the people of Bikini were left to pay for it.
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.
In September 1944 the world's first full-scale plutonium reactor went critical beside the Columbia River, then shut itself down a day later. B Reactor made plutonium for Trinity and Nagasaki, ran on into the Cold War, and now takes visitors on free tours.
In the flat farmland of north-east North Dakota stands a four-sided concrete pyramid built to guide nuclear-tipped missiles against a Soviet attack. It cost billions, reached full readiness on 1 October 1975, and was ordered closed the next day.
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.
On the Croatian side of the border with Bosnia, a Cold War airbase was cut into a mountain so that MiG-21s could be hidden, fuelled and launched from inside it. In May 1992 the army that built it blew it up, and the mountain has been quiet, mined and half forgotten ever since.
In a bowl of desert outside Albuquerque stands a wooden structure as tall as a twelve-storey building, built almost without metal so that a B-52 could be parked on it and hit with a simulated nuclear pulse. It was shut down at the end of the Cold War, and it is still there.
In May 1955 the US government built a model town in the Nevada desert, with houses, shops, cars, tinned food and seventy dressed mannequins, and dropped an atomic bomb on it. Operation Cue was one of the strangest civil defence experiments of the Cold War.
On the morning of 17 March 1953, an atomic bomb destroyed a furnished American house in the Nevada desert while a television audience watched. Operation Doorstep was meant to prove that ordinary families could survive an atomic attack. It showed something else.
In the Nevada desert the US government built two small American towns, filled them with furniture, food and dressed mannequins, and then dropped atomic bombs on them to show what would happen to a family at home. One was destroyed in 1953. Part of the other still stands.
Prora was meant to be a seaside holiday camp for 20,000 workers, a block of concrete 4.5 kilometres long on Rügen's Baltic coast. The war stopped it before a single holidaymaker arrived, and the shell went on to serve three armies before the luxury flats moved in.
Hidden in the Brandenburg forest north of Berlin, Vogelsang was a Soviet garrison town of up to 15,000 people, and for a few months in 1959 it held the first Soviet nuclear missiles in Germany.
Beneath Moscow there is said to be a second, secret metro for the country's leaders. Parts of the story are documented, and the rest is rumour that nobody in power will confirm.
Hidden in a Crimean mountain under 180 metres of rock, Object 221 was meant to run the Soviet Black Sea Fleet through a nuclear war. It was never finished, then looted, and now it may be back in military hands.
Cut into a mountain beside a narrow Crimean bay, Balaklava's secret submarine base was built to survive a nuclear strike and is now a museum.
Built in the Second World War with a runway half as long again as normal, RAF Sculthorpe became one of the biggest US Air Force bases in Britain, home to nuclear-capable bombers until it closed in 1992.
On the steppe of Astrakhan Oblast, Kapustin Yar launched the Soviet Union's first ballistic missile in 1947 and went on to test its rockets, nuclear warheads and satellite launchers. It is still a military range.
Behind an ordinary-looking bungalow in the Essex countryside, a 100-yard tunnel leads down to a three-level bunker about 125 feet underground. Built in 1952 as an RAF command centre, it became a regional government headquarters for a nuclear war, and is now a museum.
Built in the late 1960s for a secret US-British radar that never worked, the buildings on Orford Ness were given a second life as a giant medium-wave transmitter. For nearly thirty years its masts carried the BBC World Service across Europe, and now the same site broadcasts Radio Caroline.
On a Pacific island in the Marshall Islands, a concrete dome 115 metres wide covers a crater left by a 1958 US nuclear test, filled with contaminated soil and debris from the whole atoll. It was built by about 4,000 servicemen between 1977 and 1980, it has no floor liner, and the sea is rising around it.
Teufelsberg is a hill built from the ruins of Berlin, over the shell of an unfinished Nazi college. On top, American and British listeners spent the Cold War eavesdropping on the East. Today its white domes are covered in graffiti.
Founded by Swedes in 1910 and sold to the Soviet Union in 1927, Pyramiden was a showcase mining town on Spitsbergen with more than a thousand residents. Mining ended on 31 March 1998, the people left within months, and the cold has kept the town almost as they left it.
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.
Opened in 1981 on a peak in the Balkan Mountains, the Buzludzha monument was built by public subscription as the House-Monument of the Bulgarian Communist Party. Its regime fell eight years later. The saucer-shaped hall has been stripped, weathered and, since 2018, closed, while conservators work to save its mosaics.
