Okunoshima: The Rabbit Island That Made Poison Gas
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.
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The Soledar Salt Mines
Hundreds of metres below a small town in eastern Ukraine lay one of Europe's largest salt mines, with a church, a concert hall and a football pitch carved from salt. Then the war reached it.
RAF Sculthorpe: Britain’s Cold War Airfield Giant
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.
Spreepark: Berlin’s Abandoned Amusement Park
East Germany's only permanent amusement park closed in 2001–2002 after its visitor numbers collapsed, and its owner left for Peru. For more than a decade its Ferris wheel and dinosaurs rusted in the Plänterwald, and now the park is being rebuilt.
Teufelsberg: The Cold War Listening Station on a Hill of Rubble
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.
Plokštinė Missile Base: The Secret Soviet Silos in the Samogitian Forest
Deep in a forest in north-west Lithuania, about 10,000 Soviet soldiers built an underground base for four nuclear missiles aimed at Western Europe. It was one of the first of its kind, was kept secret for years and was abandoned in 1978. Today one of its silos is a museum.
Semipalatinsk Test Site: The Polygon Where the Soviet Union Tested Its Bombs
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.
RT-64: The Soviet 64-Metre Radio Telescopes at Bear Lakes and Kalyazin
Two identical 64-metre dishes were built by one Moscow engineering bureau to talk to spacecraft. One was shut down for lack of money in 1996. The other burned in 2010 and was rebuilt.