(CBS) It was 60 years ago that America dropped the most powerful bomb the world had ever seen on the Japanese city of Hiroshima and three days later a second bomb on Nagasaki ending World War II and igniting the nuclear age.

CBS News Correspondent Jerry Bowen reports that this weekend, as there have been every year since, vigils and protests marked the Aug. 6 Hiroshima anniversary, including one at the remote New Mexico mountain town where the bomb was born in great secrecy all those decades ago: the town of Los Alamos.

At the town museum, tourists now pose with replicas of the bombs: Little Boy that hit Hiroshima and Fat Man that fell on Nagasaki. The devastation they wrought still provoking awe and disbelief:

"All I wrote down was, 'Wow! It really went off. It really did.' And I had no idea what the effect would be on ending the war," says Harold Agnew, a member of the famed Manhattan Project.

Agnew was 22-years-old when he joined the Manhattan Project, the team of scientists recruited to build the bomb back in the 1940's. Later he volunteered to fly on the Hiroshima mission to measure the size of the blast. Agnew and the other scientists didn't fully comprehend what their top secret project might mean.

"At the time, I didn't really appreciate what, what the impact would be and what we were working on," Agnew recalls.

Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was the civilian head of the government project. "Oppy", as he was called, selected Los Alamos, site of an exclusive boys school, as the headquarters for the secret project. So secret that nearby Sante Fe was used as the mailing address for the scientists and their families. The outside world was not to know a thing.

"Oppenheimer argued that what they should do is corral all the scientists in essentially a secret city behind barbed wire, where they couldn't leave and nobody could come in," says author Jenny Conant. "And then all of the information behind those fences would be secure."

Conant, who has written a new book on the Manhattan Project, says it was Oppenheimer's idea that Los Alamos be equal parts university campus and bomb factory, much as it remains today.

"Behind those fences they could discuss openly their ideas," Conant says. "And that freedom, that kind of relaxed atmosphere, most people think contributed to the enormous progress that Los Alamos made in an incredibly short period of time."

In July 1945 the first atom bomb test -- the trinity explosion -- proved to "Oppy" and his team that they had succeeded. Three weeks later, after Hiroshima, the entire world would know.

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