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From covert bases to hidden defences, read on as we take a tour of some stunning, and secret, abandoned underground structures that governments built, and reveal what they cost. All dollar values in US dollars.
The project cost $7.9 million, around $69 million (£53m) in today's money, and consisted of 21 tunnels spanning 1.9 miles. It was abandoned in 1966 after Denmark protested and experts realised the ice cap was less stable than they originally believed. Tonnes of toxic waste remain at the site which, worryingly, is moving ever closer to the edge of the ice cap.
The City of Chicago has been accused of literally burying piles of taxpayer's cash after it ploughed $400 million into the Block 37 CTA Superstation in the heart of downtown. Incredibly, the city pressed ahead and constructed the station despite having no guarantee that the service the enormous station was intended for, a futuristic airport link proposed by Elon Musk's The Boring Company, was feasible.
Work began on the superstation, which would have been the downtown terminal for express trains from O'Hare International Airport, back in 2005. It soon became apparent though that the express service wouldn't come to pass and the city halted building work in 2011. The superstation remains unfinished. In total the disastrous megaproject is slated to have cost taxpayers $400 million in 2015 dollars, the equivalent of $431 million (£328m) today.
Costing $359 million, the top-secret structure was commissioned by the Chinese government when Cold War tensions were at their peak during the 1960s. The facility housed a nuclear plant capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium. When the Cold War warmed in the early 1980s, the project, which was only 85% completed, was cancelled and today the abandoned complex serves a thriving tourist attraction. The cost of the megaproject would be $883 million (£673m) in today's money.
With the Second World War turning heavily in favour of the Allies, the Nazis set about building a gargantuan underground city in April 1943. Shrouded in secrecy, Project Riese ('riese' is the German word for giant) involved the construction of seven underground structures connected by 5.5 miles of tunnels under the Owl Mountains in modern-day Poland.
Thousands of prisoners of war including children were forced to work on the mysterious megaproject and many died in the process. Construction continued until May 1945 when construction, which is estimated to have cost $60 million at the time, abruptly ceased. To this day the exact purpose of Project Riese is unknown but some historians have speculated that the subterranean city could have been built as a bunker for Hitler, or to accommodate a military base.
There was just one very major catch. While the border with Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland and Italy was robustly defended, the frontier with Belgium had little if any protection. The Nazis exploited this weakness and invaded France in May 1940 via the Franco-Belgian border. The Maginot Line was manned once again after the Second World War, but it was rendered obsolete during the Cold War and effectively abandoned in the 1960s.
Read about other abandoned megaprojects that turned out to be billion-dollar wastes of money
Carved into a mountain, this covert naval base near Tromsø was built by the Norwegian Navy in the late 1960s at a cost of $494 million, which is about $3.8 billion (£2.8bn) in today's money. No expense was spared on the base, which was equipped with the most advanced and sophisticated technology money could buy, and featured a plethora of tunnels and rooms beneath the mountain. It took 30 years to build.
The Bond villain-esque facility acted as the main service base for NATO submarines operating in the Norwegian and Barents Seas. But Olavsvern lost its key strategic importance following the fall of communism and was deactivated in 2002, before its eventual closure in 2008. In an unusual move the base was put up for sale on a Norwegian auction website and was sold at a knockdown price in 2011 to a consortium of Norwegian oil companies. Much to the Norwegian government and NATO's chagrin, the base has since been rented by affiliates of the Kremlin-linked Russian energy giant Gazprom.
Nicknamed the Deserton, the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) in Texas would have been America's very own particle collider, rivalling the famous particle collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland. If it had been completely built, the SSC may well have beaten CERN to discover the Higgs boson 'God particle'.
The SSC was first proposed in 1976 and construction began in the late 1980s. By the early 1990s, costs were spiralling out of control. The powers that be questioned the viability of the project and whether it was worth the monstrous expense. Needless to say, the shockingly over-budget SSC was cancelled in 1993. By this time, the cost of the megaproject had skyrocketed to $2.4 billion, the equivalent of $4.3 billion (£3.3bn) today, which is quite a cost for an empty underground tunnel in Texas.
A bewildering waste of taxpayers' money, the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex in Nekoma, North Dakota was completed in April 1975 at a cost of $6 billion (£4.6bn) in today's money. The cutting-edge complex, which was was built beneath and around an eye-catching pyramid structure, provided launch and control for scores of short- and longer-range anti-ballistic missiles.
Discover the world's most expensive abandoned military bases
When it was confirmed that nuclear power stations could store waste on site safely over decades, politicians began to wonder if the project was even necessary. President Obama pulled federal funding in 2011 and effectively canned the project. By then around $15 billion had been invested, the equivalent of $17.1 billion (£13bn) in today's money. With no real plans afoot to revive the project, the Yucca Mountain repository remains in limbo.
The base, which is estimated to have cost an astronomical $6 billion at the time, the equivalent of $48.7 billion (£37.2bn) today, was operational until the early 1990s. Despite the vast expense, the withdrawing Yugoslav People's Army destroyed much of the complex during the Yugoslav Wars in 1991 to prevent the opposing forces from using it for their own ends. The complex has remained abandoned ever since.
