Original subtitles

Tom voiceover: A desert ghost town

poisoned by an unnatural body of water.

It looks like some kind of apocalyptic vision.

Something happened here and it wasn't that long ago.

A derelict settlement in Czechia with a mysterious past.

You are talking billions of dollars

of environmental damage.

A notorious jungle compound that became infamous around the world.

It really is hell on earth.

And the Norwegian mountain fortress

that saw one of world war ii's most daring raids.

It was one of the most extraordinary operations of the war.

Decaying relics and ruins of lost worlds.

They were forged through years of toil,

but are now haunted by the past.

Their secrets are waiting to be revealed.

(Theme music)

Perched high on a mountain,

100 miles west of Oslo in Norway,

is a structure that could have helped change the course of history.

This place will become the subject of a major Hollywood blockbuster.

So, you have got this imposing huge building

with these giant windows overlooking the valley.

It is definitely built with purpose.

What was it for?

You can see this is a large factory type

industrial installation,

and I'm thinking the effort to have built this is enormous.

Its remote position and the barbed wire fences

suggest that whatever was inside was of great value.

It's obviously under tight security even today.

But it's the rebelling front

which is an important part of the story.

That is all that remains of a different structure

that once dominated this mountain enclave.

What went on here that you have got one building

that has lasted and will last,

and one building that obviously hasn't.

In the surviving subterranean levels is a tangled mass of steel.

Inside there are signs of immense destruction,

something happened here with great force.

The story of this great industrial complex

dates back to the beginning of the 20th century.

Men from an elite fighting force would later risk their lives

attempting to destroy it.

The surrounding terrain offers some clues

about the purpose of the building.

There are clear connections between the landscape

and particularly the waterfall and the building,

because there are vast pipes

coming off the mountain and into the building.

This is the vemork hydroelectric power plant

that was built by norsk hydro in 1911.

Gunhild luras is an expert on the history of the facility.

This is the machine hall

where the hydroelectric power was made.

When it was finished,

it was the biggest power plant in the world.

Vemork was built to produce fertiliser to help grow the crops

that were needed to feed the world's rapidly increasing population.

One of the many challenges for scientists

in the early 20th century

was to find more fertiliser for food production,

and for fertiliser you need nitrogen.

But the chemical process involved in the extraction of nitrogen

require an enormous amount of energy.

Well, one thing Norway has in abundance

with mountains and rivers is hydro power.

So, the waterfall will hilt the turbines

with high speed and then it will turn around

and you produce electricity in the generators.

Yet, in the basement of this now derelict place

is a room full of specialised equipment

that was built for a very different purposes.

This place started out producing something very good

for human beings,

but it turned out to have deadly potential.

So, this whole manufacturing of fertiliser,

this fixating of the nitrogen,

it ended up producing a by-product,

and this by-product was heavy water.

Heavy water is very complex.

It's very difficult to produce

and it's very expensive to produce.

Like ordinary water, heavy water contains two atoms,

one hydrogen and one oxygen,

but the hydrogen atom contains an extra neutron

that increases its weight by 10%.

And this type of hydrogen is known as deuterium

or a heavy form of hydrogen.

On its own it poses no danger.

However, its unique atomic structure makes it a vital ingredient

in the production of nuclear weapons.

So, when Adolf Hitler plunged the world into war in 1939,

it was no surprise that he wanted to get his hands on it.

Hitler's scientists needed the heavy water plant

to slow down and sustain a nuclear reaction,

which was a key stage

in the development of an atomic weapon.

This site was the only place in the world

where they produced heavy water at a commercial scale.

So, this was very important for the German nuclear program.

In 1940,

German troops invaded neutral Norway and captured the plant.

Within months,

production of heavy water there had increased ten-fold.

The allies knew that to have any hope of winning the war,

they had to prevent the Germans

from making and using an atomic weapon.

The key man for the allies

was the Norwegian scientist leif tronstad.

Tronstad knew the site in minute detail

because he had helped design it.

He was able to explain to the British

that simply dropping ordnance

from the air onto the site would do nothing,

as the heavy water plant was in the basement,

and bombing it would simply destroy the buildings on top.

Tronstad's plan was dangerous and thwart with risk.

It was for specialist troops to infiltrate the facility

and destroy its vital equipment from the inside.

But vemork was a natural fortress and it was very heavily guarded.

It was very mountainous terrain.

You simply can't get up there by road.

It's very easy to protect this plant in a conventional way

because it is isolated up on the mountain side.

In October 1942,

four Norwegian nationals

were parachuted in as an advance team.

The plan was for them to link up with British paratroopers

who arrived the following month as part of operation freshman.

Their mission was to break in and destroy vemork.

The first attempt ended in complete disaster.

On the 19th November 1942,

two gliders of British soldiers landed on the top of the mountain,

but one crashed and the other was found by the Germans

and the men shot.

Despite this very costly set back,

the allies had little option but to try again.

And so, in February 1943 they launched operation gunnerside.

It was to be one of the most dramatic

and important military missions of world war ii.

Six Norwegian commanders were parachuted in

and they were dressed in British uniforms

so that if captured,

the Germans wouldn't take revenge on the Norwegian population.

The plan was to rendezvous with the original Norwegian team,

which had somehow managed

to survive for three months in the sub-zero wilderness.

It landed safely, but far away from the target.

This was a supplies and logistics disaster

because they simply didn't have rations.

Incredibly, after a gruelling five-day trek

through knee-deep snow,

the two teams at last made contact.

Now, they were united,

they could finally attempt

the seemingly impossible task

of entering the site and halting Hitler's nuclear plant.

There was a discussion among the saboteurs

about how they should enter this place.

And one possibility was to cross the suspension bridge,

but it was guarded.

After the failed operation freshman,

the Germans had strengthened the power plant's defences.

Crossing the heavily guarded bridge

was obviously now out of the question.

The team would have to find another way.

Only two highly dangerous operations remained.

They were, to approach through a heavily fortified mountain pass

which was littered with land mines

or to scale a deep sided ravine of some 500 feet.

So, they decided that they were going down the gorge.

And they had to climb their way down and up again on the other side,

where there was a railway.

And on the railway there were no mines.

Once at the site,

they knew how to enter the building

and exactly where to place the explosive charges

because tronstadhad given them such detailed instructions.

In this room, the sabotage action took place.

The leader of this operation

placed charges on the heavy water cells.

After somehow sneaking past the guards,

the team made for the heavy water production room.

They had to work fast,

placing short 30-second fuses on the electrolysis chambers

that produce the heavy water,

and then they were gone.

The operation was a total success.

The explosions ripped through the plant,

destroying at least a 1,000 pounds of Hitler's heavy water.

It was one of the most extraordinary operations of the war.

Amid the chaos, in the aftermath of the explosions

the entire group managed to slip away.

Incredibly, not a single life had been lost

and no shots had been fired by either side.

The group somehow made its way back through the ravine

before splitting into smaller groups

and making good their escapes to neutral Sweden.

Eventually, every single man

found his way back to the Norwegian unit,

which was stationed in britain.

Their story of daring is forever immortalised

in the 1965 kirk Douglas blockbuster,

'the heroes of telemark'.

If the vemork plant had not been destroyed,

Hitler could have been able to go on and develop atomic weapons.

It's true that the Nazis were eventually able to resume

the production of heavy water at vemork,

but by then it was all too late.

Germany hadn't the capacity or resources

to produce an atomic bomb,

which could have turned the tide of the war in Hitler's favour.

In later years, what remained of the heavy water plant

was demolished.

Today, the site is being turned into a museum,

a lasting memorial to the daring and courageous men

who did so much to help win the war against Nazi Germany.

The saboteurs are heroes.

They are maybe one of the biggest heroes of Norway.

Just imagine,

if operation gunnerside hadn't been successful,

the world could be a rather different place.

In the middle of the barren californian desert,

some 150 miles south east of Los Angeles,

is an unusual inland sea.

When you look at this body of water,

it looks off, something is a little bit wrong with it.

Dotted around the water's edge

a crumbling remains from a long forgotten past.

It looks like some kind of apocalyptic vision.

There is all these signs of human settlement,

but everything is broken down and decrepit.

Instead of being a vast living place,

it's almost death like.

Derelict buildings and rusting relics

are all reminders of the community

that once thrived around these waters.

You can see the remnants of a motor home,

broken down, old motel.

So, something happened here and it wasn't that long ago.

So, what was it that happened here?

Are there clues to be found in the surrounding land?

As you look around, the land is alive.

There's bubbling mud coming up from gases deep within the earth.

Is this a natural phenomenon?

What changed and what is going on with this body of water?

Only 40 years ago,

this region was full of bustling towns

built to accommodate hundreds of thousands of people.

Today, only a small fraction of them are still here.

John kariotis arrived in the 1970s.

It was very nice because there were markets,

and gas stations, and restaurants.

And it was a big community that lots of people were a part of.

To see it depressed like this, it hurts.

And the people that are here are...

Probably going to be here until the day they die.

In the 1960s this was a booming holiday resort,

which attracted more than one million visitors

every single year.

It was just a two-hour drive from Los Angeles,

and it soon became a favourite playground

of Hollywood's rich and famous.

So, back in its hay day the rat pack was here,

Sammy Davis junior, frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Streisand,

a whole lot of other people.

It's before palm Springs was what it is now.

Bathers crammed onto the sun soaked beaches

and anglers filled their nets with the plentiful fish

that were found in the waters.

There were ricottas,

there were more boats out on the sea than you could shake a stick at.

The fishing was wonderful.

It's hard to imagine those luxury times.

The fact that all of these communities are down on their luck,

it's not just one or two suffering from lack of investment.

Point to a much, much bigger problem.

The thing that connects all of these sites together,

the problem is the water.

These are the ghost towns of the salton sea.

An accidental lake that transformed

the fortunes of this dusty desert region

for better and then for worse.

But how did a giant lake appear from nowhere

in the middle of one of the driest regions in the world

and why does it now resemble an apocalyptic wasteland?

In the early 1900s

everybody wanted to use the Colorado river

to irrigate farms in the surrounding desert.

The Colorado begins high in the rocky mountains

and winds some 1,500 miles to the Gulf of California.

To irrigate the important agriculture area

in the golden states imperial valley,

engineers constructed a canal

which diverted water away from the river.

But trying to tame the mighty Colorado

was no easy task.

Engineers like to be in control.

But when you are up against the force of nature,

you can never actually tell what's going to happen.

In 1905 after torrential rains,

the swollen Colorado river broke its banks.

The river changed course and began flowing west

into what was then a dry desert valley.

Every 24 hours,

six billion cubic feet of water flooded into the valley,

creating a lake that Rose by seven inches every day.

It took two years for the engineers

to figure out how to stop the flow of water.

And by that time,

it had largely filled this vast inland basin.

The lake itself essentially then created

all of the things around.

Money started coming in with the tourism,

people started wanting to tap into that.

They started building motels and beach front facilities.

And people started to drive out from Los Angeles

to check out this brand new inland sea.

They called it the salton riviera.

Spanning nearly 400square miles,

the salton sea became California's largest freshwater lake,

as well as giving birth to a thriving tourism industry.

The engineering disaster completely transformed

once inhospitable land.

The water in the desert meant that the land became fertile,

it became huge agricultural area.

Farming is very important to the area,

and imperial county is known as the breadbasket to California.

If you want fruits and vegetables all the way through the mid-west,

it very likely came from here in the imperial county.

At first it was great, you had this barren dry desert,

all of a sudden filled with fresh mountain water.

And it was this lovely kind of oasis in this,

otherwise, pretty brutal desert.

So, what began as a catastrophe

soon became known as the miracle in the desert.

But the success of this man-made californian lake

was short lived,

and before long the miracle had turned

to something of a nightmare.

Well, here we are in the centre of town.

This used to be the bank the building

that we are in right here now.

In its hay day you could expect

that there were traffic jams out here in the street,

people crossing in the middle of the street

and not really caring who they stopped

and what they did because they were here for a good time.

Little did everybody know,

but an ecological time bomb was ticking.

Looking at the beach today,

you don't have to be a specialist to know that it doesn't look right.

It doesn't look natural, there is something alien about landscape.

Everything is covered with this fine layer

of a kind of a white dusty powder.

The once pristine beaches now look very different indeed.

John kariotis's wife Amari witnessed it first-hand

the devastation that came to the region.

You know, people think that this is sand.

This is millions of fishes, fish bones, vertebrae.

There is barnacles in here.

It looks really pretty, but it's just dead fish,

millions and millions of dead fish.

You begin to start to think, is there a natural disaster?

Well, this is a very active part of the earth geologically.

It's very near to the San Andreas fault

and many other faults.

One of the stranger things that you find is this kind of area

where there is all these mud pots bubbling up.

It's almost like an alien landscape.

Could it be that something like this happening suddenly changed

the environments around and caused many problems?

Was this a natural disaster or something that was man-made?

But the bubbling and boiling areas are the clues

that tell us this is no ordinary body of water.

At first impression you might assume

some sort of natural disaster has caused the problems here.

But when you delve in something more sinister is going on

because it's not a natural disaster, it's a man-made problem.

The only source of new water for the salton sea

comes from the half a million acres

of agricultural terrain that surround it.

And there was the problem,

the huge benefits that came as a result of industrial farming

actually had a terrible cost.

Because it's the lowest place in the landscape,

there is no in and out like a normal lake might have.

So, what goes into the system, stays in the system.

It's constantly getting saltier and denser as the water evaporates.

You see that in the dead sea in Israel.

Here the problem is impounded because what water is flowing in

is flowing through these various irrigated farms,

so it's highly polluted with pesticides and fertiliser.

And what we are left with in the lake

is this chemical soup.

The fish can't breathe and they die

and then they end up on the shore.

We have had half a mile in of dead fish,

and it was horrific.

The smell was horrific.

No one wanted to be on the beach.

Eventually, the tourists and visitors stopped coming

and the once thriving towns were abandoned.

And there was even worse to come.

Over the past 15 years,

the water level has dropped by almost eight feet,

exposing 20,000 acres of lake-bed.

In that region of the desert, there is almost no rainfall.

So, the salton sea started to dry up.

And its now exposing this fine dust with lots of salt,

but also lots of these poisonous pesticides

and so on concentrated in it.

The winds pick up sand from the desert,

and it will pick up the chemicals

and transport them hundreds of miles across the rest of america.

It's a huge risk to public health.

Beaches that were once packed with sunbathers

are now lifeless, toxic sludges.

It's heart-breaking for those that knew this place in its hay day.

And it has a whole impact.

We have the highest asthma rate because of this,

there are people who are ill because...

Of breathing this.

Behind every tourist town,

there is a population of people whose home it is.

That's where they bring up their children,

that's where they live and they die.

And for people here, it's very, very sad.

Today, the hotels and restaurants are abandoned,

all just fading memories of a once golden age.

Used to think that this was gonna be a place

that was going to come back

to the way it was in the '60s and '70s.

And I'm sadly mistaken, it's not going to happen.

In French Guiana,

on the north east coast of South America,

is a remote Amazon settlement with a brutal past.

Some of the buildings here look relatively pleasant,

colonial buildings

with the traditional wooden shutters.

But as you move farther into the site,

you encounter a different type of building.

It's clear that people have been here

before and lots of them.

And they have left their Mark quite literally on the walls.

The more you look around, it becomes apparent.

It's tinged with suffering and sadness.

The walls feel like they are closing in.

It's getting more and more unpleasant

and the dark history of this place is beginning to dawn on you.

There is no doubt that this place was one some kind of prison.

And for one famous inmate,

the story of his life here

and of his daring eventual escape became an international bestseller.

But was it true?

Was it really his story or was it embellished?

Clearly, there is a lot here worth investigating.

The intriguing story behind these crumbling buildings

began in 19th century France.

The French were facing an issue with their prisons.

They were crowded and they were expensive.

Slavery is about to be abolished around the world

and their colonies.

To solve the twin problems of rising crime

and the shortage of workers

to maintain France's foreign territories,

Napoleon III came up with a radical solution.

The French began exploiting their colonial territories abroad

by sending their very worst criminals there.

This removed dangerous prisoners from France,

took the strain off the French prison system

and gave the French colonists a free workforce abroad.

Built in 1850,

this penal colony on the maroni river

was the first stop for convicts sentenced to prison

with hard labour in French Guiana.

It's no coincidence that this type of punishment

was often used in some of the most inhospitable

and remote territories in any given European's empire.

By 1946, some 70,000 convicts

had been shipped across the Atlantic to South America.

Yet, it would be another two decades before this place

became infamous around the world.

On the walls are names and signatures,

and one of them in particular leads you to realise

what an incredible story this place has to tell.

So, there is a very famous inmate here, papillon.

The man is a legend, the mysterious prisoner

with the larger butterfly tattooed on his chest.

In 1969, his account of his life here was published

and it became an international bestseller.

Four years later, Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman

brought the story to an even wider audience

in the movie 'papillon'.

This is the notorious Saint-Laurent-du-maroni prison,

part of a grim complex of penal colonies in French guano.

Local guide Ronnie explains more.

The more tough and rough guys stayed here.

And you see here, papillon's cell.

Henri charriere, alias papillon, this is his cell.

And on the floor here,

you see he write his name papillon.

Henri charriere was just 27 years old

when he was sent here in 1931.

His story began here,

but as we will see it is to end at a place

with a reputation even more fearsome.

Henri charriere was sentenced to life imprisonment

with ten years hard labour for a murder

he claimed he never committed.

As well as the usual brutalities of hard labour,

there was also a very hot and difficult tropical climate

with all the diseases that it brings,

malaria, dysentery, fever, typhus, even leprosy.

An astonishing 40% of new arrivals died

within the first year.

There were almost daily acts of violence

between the prisoners.

Here, only the strongest and the fittest survived.

If you eat, they're going to punish you.

Maybe you don't eat, they take your food,

they beat you, take your money, take everything from you.

The prisoners were regularly beaten by the prison guards.

If any inmate dared to retaliate, the punishment was severe.

They were put to death by guillotine.

The executions were carried out here in the open space

between the two rows of barracks.

They don't seem to (inaudible) When the knife go down shack.

They say (inaudible) And then they begin to sing.

The whole place here sing a song for their friend.

It's no coincidence that

these prisons had large graveyards attached to them.

For most people sent there it was gonna be a one-way trip.

Part of the uproar for the prisons in French Guiana

was these places were never about rehabilitation,

it was about using vulnerable people in society as slave labour.

Its hardly surprising that there were many attempts to escape,

they were rarely successful.

The architecture of the prison is like prisons worldwide,

but in this place the environment was also a prison.

In the jungle you've got spiders,

poisonous snakes, venomous centipedes,

flesh eating ants.

You think, "oh, well, I'll escape the heat on the river."

You don't want to do that either

'cause it's full of piranhas and Cayman.

Despite the overwhelming odds,

papillion refused to give up hope of escape.

He made several attempts, they all failed.

And for those escapes

he was finally sent to devil's island,

which was considered the most inescapable

of all of the colonies.

Devil's island was the most feared place

in the French guiana prison system.

Situated 10 miles offshore,

the bleak rocky out crop

was surrounded by shark-infested waters.

Being sent there was bad enough,

but papillon was also sentenced to two years solitary confinement.

Solitary confinement quarters

have to be one of the worst aspects of the site.

Imagine being shut in, completely on your own,

no ventilation, no window, nothing,

just you alone with your thoughts.

Amazingly, after 13 years of imprisonment

and 9 escape attempts,

papillion finally broke free from devil's island.

Using a bag of coconuts as a raft,

charriere escaped and eventually made it to Venezuela,

where he started a business.

He became a restaurateur

and then he wrote a book about his experiences.

But after all this time the mystery still remains

as to how much of it is actually true.

A French justice ministry report into the devil's island complex

concluded that charriere's story

should be divided by at least 10 to get anywhere near the truth.

Others insisted that the episodes in the book

were imagined or embellished.

Much later, another former prisoner came forward

to claim that he not charriere was actually papillion.

Some thought that this book is a mix of other people's stories

as well as his own.

Actually, when it comes down to it,

the truth is this was a harsh environment.

Whatever the reality is,

the controversy surrounding

charriere's account continue to this day.

He died from throat cancer in 1973,

so the truth about him will probably never be known.

But news of the barbaric conditions here

did eventually seep back to France.

And once news about the inhumane conditions got out,

the French conscience was stirred by these revelations,

and the lease on life for these places was shut indeed.

A century after it opened,

the doors of the penal colony were finally closed

and the remaining prisoners were repatriated,

except for 300 of them who simply refused to leave.

Instead remained in French Guiana,

it was the only life that they remembered

and the only one that they could imagine.

Today, thankfully the prisoners are gone

and these derelict buildings and empty cells

are all that are left to remind us of the darker side of colonialism.

Fifty miles north east of Prague

the capital of Czechia,

a vast wilderness extends as far as the eye can see.

It's a spectacular area.

It's rural, quiet.

It feels like the ideal place for a day's hiking.

When you start to investigate further,

you have also got settlements

that hint that there has been populations

that have lived in this area for rather a long time.

A short distance away

there are structures that appear to date for more recent times.

You can see that this area has been developed

over a fairly long time

and there are different buildings from different eras here.

There is something of a mix.

Any trace of the people who once walked

these ghostly stairwells has long since vanished.

What's strangest of all is a building

with a very creepy air.

There is a large bath, showers,

and a contraption that's big enough to walk through.

Outside, there are bullet cases, pockmarked walls,

and twisted metal.

The mystery deepens.

It makes you wonder what is wrong with this place.

People keep on coming, but then going.

What is happening?

The intriguing structures are located in a region of Czechia

that has a complex history.

The reasons they were built

are to be found during the post-war years.

When the communist party came to power in czechoslovakia

after world war ii,

the country effectively became a satellite state of the ussr.

Czechoslovakia was on the border with west Germany.

That was the front line of the cold war.

This sprawling site in ralsko

was once the biggest Soviet army base in czechoslovakia.

When it was built, only red army soldiers

were allowed to enter the top secret facility.

In modern warfare, you need large training areas.

Not just to base the troops, but you need large tracks of land,

where you can fire artillery.

Even today, access to all areas of the site is restricted.

Retired local policeman vaclav bilicky

worked nearby in the 1970s.

His job was to tackle the hazardous materials

that spilled out from within the base.

I came here in 1976.

I was working for the police force,

at the time called the national security corp,

as a bomb disposal expert.

Within this area we had a blasting hole

for destroying ammunition.

But why were the Soviets so desperate to conceal

what they were doing inside and what disaster lay in store?

Throughout the 20th century this was on the front-line

of a bitter European territorial dispute.

During the early years,

it was occupied for training purposes

by the austro-Hungarian military.

Later, the luftwaffe used it during the world war ii.

This part of Europe

was home to thousands of ethnic Germans,

and Hitler very much wanted to bring them

within his concept of greater Germany.

After the war,

the czechoslovakian government

will then brutally expelled the Germans

and seized their land, seized their property.

The stage was now set for the czechoslovak army

to unleash a new wave of destructive power.

All the homes, schools and churches,

they used them for target practice.

With heavy munitions, they flattened the lot.

So, those little quirky houses that were built into the rock face,

they were just cellars.

The houses actually were above ground

and those houses were blown to smithereens.

This was just the beginning of the areas rapid transformation

into a modern military zone.

But as the years past,

the threat posed by the Soviet union grew even stronger.

Until then czechoslovakia had been the only Warsaw pactcountry

not to host Soviet troops.

They were everywhere else

in Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria,

everywhere but here.

On August 20th, 1968,

amid a wave of anti-communist protests,

all that changed.

The Soviets had to have a quarter of a million troops

into Prague and the core cities of czechoslovakia.

The number doubled over the next couple of days.

After the Soviet invasion, there was a treaty side

and that stated that 75,000 Soviet troops

could be stationed in this region.

It's that invasion that explains the reasons

for the buildings here.

These buildings were intended for the families of the pilots,

officers of the Soviet army.

At a time when both east and west

were threatening each other with annihilation,

the location of this place

would have made is strategically vital

in the event of all-out war.

Up to 20,000 Soviet troops were living there

in a full military town

with schools, shops, apartment buildings, workspaces.

The existing airfield was rapidly expanded

and bunker-like structures

were built to conceal state-of-the-art attack aircraft.

The Soviets were preparing for a new kind of war.

The mig-23 was a big step forward,

and it was very capable

and it would have made a very pretty good opponent.

Yet, much of the history here is still hidden in secrecy.

After the collapse of the Soviet union,

the true scale of the weapon stockpile

started to become clear

and more alarming discoveries were being made all the time.

So, with the military gone,

you've now got a city sized grassland

absolutely strewn with live ammunition.

How do you go about making a place like that safe again?

Over 130,000 pieces of unexploded ordinance were left dumped

or crudely buried in the ground.

Vaclav was part of the team

with the hazardous job of clearing it all up.

This was probably the most dangerous piece of ammunition here.

If it remained in this condition and someone had found it

and wasn't careful enough,

it was quite a blast.

Inside one building is evidence

that the Soviets may have been developing

even more sinister weapons of war.

As you go in, you can see this weird looking machine.

And it's now felt that that machine is an autoclave,

they used to decontaminate and sterilise equipment.

Whatever they were up to with that equipment,

it was serious business.

In all 50 million cubic feet of soil

was found to be polluted by dangerous contaminates.

When the Soviets left,

it cost millions of dollars of environmental damage.

Despite this, the Soviets ignored all requests

to help restore and clean up the mess

they had left behind.

Although, much of the land has been cleared,

there remains always the danger of undiscovered ammunitions.

So, work still has to be done

to make it 100% safe for the local people.

To this day,

the Soviets have never revealed

what took place behind closed doors here.

So, until the cold war era archives are fully opened,

the site will continue to be shrouded in mystery.

Now, they are abandoned, crumbling ruins.

Many remind us of dark times,

but some were once beacons of hope and progress,

lasting testimonies to human imagination,

enterprise, and spirit.

(Music)

Captioned by ai-media ai-media. TV