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11 eerie images of radioactive ruins from the Cold War's 'secret cities' by Courtney Verrill on Apr 29, 2016, 1:49 PM , kazakhstan 2011.jpg) There are many secrets from the long lasting Cold War that only officials know about — and that includes the recently not-so-secret closed cities from the war on the border between Kazakstan and Russia.
These cities have rigid restrictions where specific authorization is required to visit, and no outsiders were aware of them until long after the Cold War ended, when they finally showed up on a map in the 1990's. Priozersk and Kurchatov, located in eastern Kazakstan, are two of the closed cities where Russian military tested hundreds of atomic bombs and weapons during the Cold War. Photographer Nadav Kander visited the closed city of Kurchatov in 2011 with the help of a local contact. "The aesthetics of destruction have a really beautiful ring to me," Kander said in an interview at Flowers Gallery. With his images, he wrote a book entitled Dust. Below, see his eerie images of the radioactive ruins left in the closed cities. SEE ALSO: This failed $5.3 billion nuclear power plant in Germany is now an amusement park The city of Kurchatov was built specifically for the nuclear tests.  Source: Study
The testing allowed scientists to study the disastrous effects of radiation on the local population, wildlife, and landscape. The testing program ended in 1989, and these small cities were shortly ruined to protect their military secrets. 
To this day, the sites are still radioactive from the testing. When Kander visited, he wore white overalls equipped with Geiger couners — a device for measuring radioactivity by detecting and counting ionizing particles — to protect him from the radiation. 
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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