South of Interstate 80 in Wendover, just a roll of the dice away from the glitz and glam of the West Wendover casinos, crumbling along the tarmac that pierces the salt flat, lies an American treasure.

Some would say good riddance to the old airplane hangar on the once-bustling U.S. Army air base, now a forlorn municipal airport. Let the metal rust and the asbestos flake and the wood rot. This is a place to be forgotten.

Others say the ramshackle building should be brought back to life, preserved and restored and made into a museum, a solemn reminder of the missions that unleashed atomic weaponry on the world, claiming more than 200,000 lives in an instant, perhaps saving many more. This is a place, they say, and we agree, that the world must never forget.

It was here that the Enola Gay and Bockscar, the heavy bombers that carried atomic weapons to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were readied and stored.

Ground crews learned to hoist the massive bombs -- Little Boy and Fat Man -- into the bellies of the B-29 Superfortresses. Flight crews practiced raining hell from 26,000 feet.

The hangar has seen better days. And now, after the building was placed on the National Trust for Historic Preservation's "Most Endangered Historic Places List" last week, it stands a better chance of seeing them again.

Last year, Tooele County and the nonprofit Historic Wendover Airport organization secured a $450,000 grant from the National Park Service's Save America's Treasures program to help preserve the hangar, but matching funds are needed. The red alert raised by the "most-endangered" designation could bring donations from preservation foundations, and make the long-sought restoration a reality. A complete renovation could cost up to $5 million, according to the National Trust.

If the Atomic Heritage Foundation has its way, the old air base -- where about 100 of the original 700 structures remain -- could be a part of something much, much bigger.

The foundation hopes to link assorted atomic weapons development sites, from the air base in Wendover to a plutonium production facility in Hanford, Wash., to a complex in Los Alamos, N.M. where the bombs were designed -- eight sites in all -- and tell the story of the Manhattan Project. The proposal is being studied by the National Park Service, and the feds need to pick up the pace before it's too late.

The planes are perfectly preserved, displayed in museums in Dayton, Ohio, and near Washington, D.C. But the remaining components of those historic missions must not be lost.