On a recent day in late June, a warm day under clear, deep-blue skies, the city of Los Alamos, New Mexico, “The Atomic City,” hung its banners out. Red, white, and blue, blown by the high mesa wind, they waved across Trinity Avenue, the city’s main thoroughfare, named tor the site of the first atomic explosion, the site most of us call Alamagordo; they waved at the east gate, where a Mexican restaurant now occupies the gatehouse that formerly controlled the secret comings and goings of famous men; they waved from the county municipal building that has replaced with stylish glass and stone the jerry-built, pale-green barracks of Main Tech, where the bomb was dreamed and designed. Thirty years after the beginning of the Atomic Age, thirty years after a few thousand men and women, working in secrecy against a deadline they measured not in dollars but in lives, changed the history of the world, Los Alamos was welcoming what the banners called its “veterans and pioneers” home for reunion.

The 30th Reunion of Los Alamos Veterans and Pioneers received little national attention. The President of the United States wasn’t there, nor the Secretary of Defense, nor even New Mexico’s two senators, though both wired messages of congratulations. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the BBC sent commentators and camera crews, but ABC, NBC, and CBS passed the occasion by. Veterans and pioneers came anyway, nearly a thousand of them, cooks and scientists, MPs and lab technicians and engineers, men and women who remembered their years at Los Alamos as the most significant years of their lives and wanted to recall them again.

To the politicians and media who stayed away, the reunion must have seemed as private a celebration of nostalgia and longevity as a local assembly of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, but it was much more. At Los Alamos in late June of 1975, not for the first time but possibly for the last, the men and women of World War II laid markers on the grave of a more heroic age. In that spirit of innocence, or in Disneyesque imitation, Los Alamos was named a National Bicentennial Community, a distinction it shares with the early cities of the American Revolution. Like the Declaration of Independence and the Liberty Bell, the atomic bomb thus took its place as a patriotic artifact.

The bomb that shriveled the scorpions and tarantulas on New Mexico’s Journada del Muerto— the desert of the conquistadores’ “Journey of Death”; the bomb that vaporized the 100-foot steel tower at Trinity site, the site that J. Robert Oppenheimer named in allusion to one of John Donne’s holy sonnets, in the hope that upon it the three-personed God would batter our hearts free of the evil of war; the bomb that, in his ignorance, a rancher on the other side of the mountains took to be an early and extra and miraculous dawn, was a crude, primitive machine. Fat Man, it was called. It contained two hemispheres of plutonium surrounded by shaped charges of high explosive. Its joints were firmed with Kleenex and its charges tightened with Scotch tape. It weighed, in its spherical steel casing, 10,000 pounds, but only one gram of its eighty-four pounds of plutonium completely fissioned to produce its nuclear explosion; one gram, m, times the square of the speed of light, c2, equals E, 20,000 tons of TNT equivalent. So a few grams of heavy metal marked the end of a long and destructive war. We live in a time, Sϕren Kierkegaard wrote in Either/Or, when the smallest causes produce the most immense effects, and large causes produce hardly any effect at all.

Those who count the atomic casualties and forget the dead of Normandy and Bataan, of Bergen-Belsen and Guadalcanal, count by a system different from that of the people of the reunion. The people of the reunion count back, not forward; for them, the outcome of their three years of work was an end, not a beginning, which is why they could gather in good conscience to commemorate it. “I think it’s grotesque,” said the CBC’s Mike Maclear of the reunion, and to the extent that the people gathered there had the blood of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on their hands, it was, but they didn’t see it that way, and perhaps they had reason.

“It was a war,” said the widow of a veteran, “that you took personally, because you had brothers or a husband or friends who were off fighting it, risking their lives.” It was also a war gone fetid with the stink and the fear of death, a war of death marches and final solutions, of black headlines in the morning paper and gold stars in the windows down the block, of seemingly endless lines of Panzers and of Japanese soldiers who preferred, rather than surrender, to fold themselves over grenades. “Soon after firing ceases,”a Japanese wrote before a banzai charge on the Aleutians in 1943, “birds are singing and flving around about the quiet and frozen ground. I will become a deity with a smile in this heavy fog. I am only waiting for the day of death.” After three years of such a war, the atomic bomb seemed to those who devised it not a weapon of doomsday, but a weapon of deliverance. That it would burden mankind with the knowledge of the possibility of its annihilation they can be forgiven for not having known.