There’s a quiet sense of foreboding permeating this series of black and white photos of old uranium mining towns and nuclear test sites throughout the West, captured by Australian-American photographer Brett Leigh Dicks. The images depict scenes that once held enormous potential: first for progress, then for danger and destruction. Now they’re just empty. “Atomic Alchemy: Nuclear Landscapes Across the American West” explores how these sites scattered across Utah, Idaho, Arizona and New Mexico rose and fell along with public perception of nuclear power in the early stages of its development and post World War II, after the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“The United States Atomic Energy Commission predicted that, by the turn of the 21st century, one thousand reactors would be producing electricity for homes and businesses across the U.S.,” reads Dicks’ artist statement. “The reality was far short of what was promised, as nuclear technology produced a range of problems… not to mention the unresolved difficulties of site decommissioning and water disposal.”

Missile launch centers, uranium mines, atomic bomb loading pits and infamous sites like the Enola Gay Hanger in Utah and the Trinity Test Site in New Mexico are pictured as they stand today in their quiet desert environments. Many are little more than roadside curiosities; the heaviness of their history lingers in the air despite their current state of stillness. Dicks sees them as “an eerie testament to a period of time that was meant to revolutionize civilization.”

The photographer says his primary area of interest “investigates the landscape and the fragile ties that it shares with social progress adn historical significance,” and his previous projects include “explorations of abandoned military complexes, decommissioned prisons, walls constructed from socio-political divides and nuclear landscapes.” Check out more of his work at BrettLeighDicks.com.

Thousands of people who lived and worked in Oak Ridge, Tennessee during the 1940s had no idea what they were actually doing every day, performing their tasks as directed without asking questions, surrounded by constant reminders that they needed to keep their traps shut or else. It wasn’t until the United States bombed Hiroshima in 1945 that they learned they were processing uranium as part of The Manhattan Project, many of them exposed to radiation for years.

Nicknamed the Secret City, the Atomic City and the City Behind the Fence, Oak Ridge was developed by the government on 56,000 acres of former farmland and remains a center of nuclear research and development today. In photos from the World War II era, published by the U.S. Department of Energy and taken by Oak Ridge’s only authorized photographer Ed Westcott, we see the many signs reminding residents that their discretion was paramount, even if they didn’t exactly know what they were keeping secret.

While part of the city was open to the public, all visitors were required to go through military checkpoints on their way in and out. Other areas were strictly restricted. If anyone asked too many questions, they were out of a job and a home.

In the decades that have passed since then, some workers have spoken publicly about their experience, talking about the strange clicking instruments they had to wave over all sorts of objects, including uniforms. That instrument, of course, was checking for radiation.

In addition to its many official facilities, Oak Ridge became home to ten schools, seven theaters, 17 restaurants and cafeterias, 13 supermarkets, 17 churches, a symphony orchestra and enough prefabricated modular homes for its 75,000 residents.

Two years after World War II ended, Oak Ridge transitioned to civilian control, but retains the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where the supercomputer Titan was developed in 2012. Tours of the original facility are offered, but there’s so much interest, you have to add your name to a waiting list if you want to get in.

A legacy of living in the most-bombed country per capita in world history, Laotian citizens have spent decades since the Vietnam War dealing with close to 100 million undetonated weapons of targeted destruction.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the US covertly dropped hundreds of millions of bombs on the country, at an average rate of one bomb-load per eight minutes. Today, converted bomb remnants are visible across the country, used virtually intact to loft houses above flood planes, hollowed out and turned into watercraft or containers, or stripped down for scrap.

An entire (now shrinking) nationwide industry has grown up around finding, stripping and transforming cluster bombs into metal pieces and parts deconstructed or refit for various new uses. In many villages, bombshells are visible throughout the built environment.

Photographer Mark Watson took a cross-country bike trip and documented these remarkable cases of reuse. “Scrap from such widespread bombing has been utilized in people’s homes and villages,” Watson said, “for everything from house foundations to planter boxes to buckets, cups and cowbells.”

While it may sound at first like an uplifting story of turning swords into ploughshares, there is a dark side to this tale. To this day, over 100 people die annually from accidental detonations, either from bombs still loose in the countryside or in attempts to deactivate or convert found ordnance.

Non-profit organizations working to clear the country of this danger estimate it may yet take another century to complete the cleanup process (via Inhabitat and Mark Watson of Highlux Photography).