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.
