At Colby, Traister remembers, he turned to the south and scanned the horizon for mushroom clouds every time a blast went off at a construction site on I-95. "I figured I'd miss New York, but Boston I knew I'd see," he said. Early on, he'd become friends with Diane Scrafton '61, who'd come to Colby from the Staten Island section of the bull's-eye. "I happened to tell her about this folly [of mistaking construction for Armageddon] one day when we were talking, and she looked at me and said, 'I haven't met anybody else who does that, but I do it too.' . . . We both laughed nervously because we knew this was silly, but we also knew that it wasn't quite silly."

Although Colby wasn't entirely isolated from the social upheaval of the '60s, Traister recollects a widely felt sense that the campus was out of the nuclear crosshairs. Political science professor Marvin Weinbaum was away in one of the big East Coast cities when the Cuban missile crisis hit. "I remember when he got back, he was mobbed by students who all wanted to know what it was like to be near a bull's-eye. . . . It hadn't occurred to us that Limestone [Loring Air Force Base] was within nuclear distance of Waterville. We always saw this in terms of city destruction rather than military destruction. We weren't particularly sophisticated."

The anxiety of a life lived looking down the barrel of a nuclear weapon is not an experience Traister believes is unique. "It gives you a certain amount of pause," he said, "but it doesn't give everyone the same kind of pause. I suspect there are far more scars on people my age or thereabouts than we ever think about." In the early '90s he delivered a paper in Lawrence, Kan., and had occasion to mention that he'd grown up in the bull's-eye. "This guy came back at me and said, 'New York! Gimme a break!' He said he came from North Dakota and that was the real bull's-eye. He said, 'We're where the missile silos are. You're going to be the dessert, but we're the main course.'"

Traister still retains his childhood compulsion for doodling mushroom clouds on everything, except now the figurative doodling consists of reading almost everything related to war and atomic weaponry and teaching courses like Nuclear Fictions. Drawing lessons from that personal reading project is like trying to pocket a mushroom cloud. "I don't know," he said of Hiroshima. "A lot of innocent people suffered. Dropping the bomb falls under the rubric of 'crimes against humanity,' but it isn't just that. As prosecutors of war, the Japanese were not nice people."

By the time the bomb was ready, Hitler, who was the intended target, had already been defeated, and the U.S. was locked in a savage endgame war with Japan. The immediate crisis, the exigencies of war, made the bomb an irresistible alternative to what was expected to be a bitter and costly invasion of Japan. It also had the added benefit of impressing the Soviet Union in the cold–possibly hot–war that everyone could see coming.

Little Boy exploded above Hiroshima with a force equivalent to 12,500 tons of TNT. Almost half the people within a mile of the blast were killed outright. Many who lived called out for death. Altogether about 140,000 people, 54 percent of the city's population, died by the end of 1945–200,000 if you count the bomb-related dying that continued over the next five years.

Paul Fussell, in his essay "Thank God for the Atomic Bomb," writes that "real war experience tend[s] to complicate attitudes about the most cruel ending of that most cruel war." As a young lieutenant leading an infantry platoon, Fussell was slated to take part in the invasion of the Japanese mainland despite being partly disabled by injuries received in the war with Germany. "I was simultaneously horrified about the bombing of Hiroshima and forever happy because the event saved my life," he writes. In his "soldier's view," the annihilation of Hiroshima was "sadistic and humanitarian, horrible and welcome."

"If I understand him correctly," Traister said, "it is the essence of tragedy. Nothing you can do is going to be good, so you do something and hope you can live with the evil that you've done. In tragedy, sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't work." The balance of good and evil that issued from the deed is not easily calculated, and volumes have been written sharply contesting the point. "I don't know what the answer is," he continued. "I doubt that there is one–or, let me put it this way: I doubt that there is only one–and I think differently about it myself on different days."

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