A popular day's outing in Bovington consists of watching military tank driving practice.

One of the largest fleets of armored vehicles in the world, sitting out in the California desert.

The White House Situation Room was taken apart in 2006 and shipped to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

A winding district gerrymandered into the shape of a mantis.

Conveniently located within binocular range of a nuclear bunker, the "summer camp" area was a painfully obvious spy house.

A relic of FDR's brief foray into utopian urban planning.

Three abandoned missile silos are hiding in plain sight behind a suburban development in Maryland.

Cold War intelligence agents monitored communist embassies from an attic in a former pigeon coop.

This massive swimming pool is the high tech home to the human-powered submarine races.

Proto-CIA agents trained with grenades in the sand traps and fired machine guns from the fairways.

When it opened during the final years of the embargo, all the drinks and cigars were free.

A nostalgic bibliographic gem.

A secret greenspace hides atop a Capitol parking garage.

During Prohibition, the U.S. Congress had an "official" bootlegger, with his own Capitol Hill office.

One critic described it as "middle Mussolini, early Ramses, and late Neiman-Marcus." Another called it an architectural "natural disaster."

The fountains of the U.S. Navy Memorial are annually salted with water from the Seven Seas as part of a nautical ritual.

Disks are rolled out onto the south lawn to absorb the impact of Marine One's wheels like giant coffee coasters.

They sort through millions of dollars worth of diplomatic gifts on behalf of the government.

Rumor has it the hot dog stand was targeted by two Russian nuclear missiles.

The Pentagon is so large that it was planned like a city, complete with internal highway infrastructure.

Right next to departures—how convenient!

Was there a small "backpack nuke" hidden in the attic? JFK apparently thought so.

The FBI's urban training course may have the highest fake crime rate in the world.

The U.S. government built the million-pound stack of steel during the Space Race.