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For some, it may seem like rewriting history. For others, it will be a chance to tell the entire story. For still others, it should be an opportunity to tell it like it really was — the good, the bad and the ugly.

We hope that, when the curtain is lifted next spring, visitors to the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque will get a balanced, comprehensive and accurate history of the still-evolving nuclear age.

As Tribune reporter Carrie Seidman detailed Monday, in "Atomic Museum to alter focus, tone," Albuquerque's sometimes-controversial National Atomic Museum is on its way to becoming the brand-spanking-new National Museum of Nuclear Science and History.

Assuming, that is, that it can raise the remaining $2 million needed to complete construction of the permanent $10.5 million museum on a 12-acre site at Eubank and Southern boulevards near Kirtland Air Force Base.

Where, incidentally, are all those donations and sponsorships from the nuclear industry and all it spawns, from power plants to radiation therapy?

The new museum will be close to its original home on Kirtland, where it was born as the Sandia Atomic Museum in 1969 and where it existed for 30 years.

During most of that period, the museum was little more than a impressive warehouse of nuclear weaponry, tracing the historical arms race that began with the opening salvos of the atomic age: the construction of the first bombs at Los Alamos; the first atomic bomb blast — the Trinity test in the New Mexico desert near Alamogordo; and the first and only military detonations of nuclear bombs, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, that ended World War II.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, intense base-visitor security restrictions drove the museum off base. Now it is located in temporary quarters, in what has proved to be the less-friendly confines of the Old Town museum district.

But the museum plans to move to the new facility and open a little more than a year from now, in March 2009. Construction is expected to begin this spring.

The display outside the temporary museum in Old Town of a 60-foot-high Redstone rocket — used to deliver nuclear warheads — caused quite a protest from anti-nuclear groups, though it need not have.

The Cold War history of nuclear weapons is as relevant to the nuclear age as sculptured dinosaurs are to the inside exhibits of the N.M. Museum of Natural History — just down the block from the temporary atomic museum.

In any event, the new site, owned by the Department of Energy, which oversees the museum, should harbor no historical prejudices, one way or the other.

In its new location, the museum for the first time will have a grand opportunity to offer a far more comprehensive picture of the nuclear age, including its beneficial uses, such as nuclear power and nuclear medicine. Presumably it also will do more to educate visitors about the realities of radiation, the problems associated with nuclear wastes and the human horrors of actually using nuclear weapons in war.

In the post-Cold War era, it also would be interesting to see an exhibit on the cumulative costs of the world's nuclear arsenals — maybe even some comparative shopping that illustrates what that money might have bought in an alternative to the Cold War.

Most encouraging is Museum Director Jim Walther's promise that the nuclear museum — Part 3 — will be "a little like the Wal-Mart of nuclear science." Not only will the new museum commit "more and more space" to the "other parts of the story," but it aims to prompt "global conversations on nuclear issues."

In proximity to copies of the hulls of the first atomic bombs, "Fat Man" and "Little Boy," it will be most interesting to see on display the 1941 Packard stretch limousine of physicist and Los Alamos Director Robert Oppenheimer. In many ways, Oppenheimer was the essence of the nuclear age: leading this nation's premier scientists in a death race to develop the first atomic bomb; then expressing regret about his role in killing tens of thousands of Japanese and devastating the two Japanese cities; and finally having his security clearance pulled by an ungrateful nation.

We must, as nation, come to grips with the entire nuclear age, and it is compelling that there will be room in our new national nuclear museum for Oppenheimer's Packard, as well as his Fat Man and Little Boy.