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.
