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.
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.
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.
In March 1946 the United States moved the 167 people of Bikini Atoll to another reef so it could test nuclear weapons. Twenty-three devices were fired there by 1958, including the 15-megaton Castle Bravo. The people have not resettled, and the lagoon is now a World Heritage site and a wreck-diving destination for technical divers.
