Touring Los Alamos, the town

The town of Los Alamos is strangely compact -- and the lab surprisingly sprawling. Surrounding Ashley Pond in the center of town are Fuller Lodge, a memorial where the school's icehouse once stood, Los Alamos city hall and two museums.

The Los Alamos Historical Society's museum, behind the lodge, appears at first to contain the kind of exhibits that could be found in any county courthouse museum. There are exhibits on local geography, Indian settlements and the first Spanish settlers. Then there are the displays on military life, and the exhibits of atomic memorabilia.

The Bradbury Science Museum is the official museum of the lab. Named for the lab's second director (after Oppenheimer), the museum offers exhibits on the lab's work from World War II to the present.

In one room of the museum, there are gifts presented on the lab's 50th anniversary. One is particularly poignant: A replica of a Soviet SS-11 ICBM is mounted on a piece of an actual, dismantled SS-11 warhead. The inscription reads "From Russia with Love" in English, and "Fragment of a destroyed nuclear weapon" in Russian.

Officially, there is little sign in Los Alamos that The Bomb was controversial. There is an exhibit at the Bradbury museum on the movies and comic books that accompanied America's atom mania, but none on anti-nuclear protests. Los Alamos remains a company town.