While it's a war for country that provides the entry point for the series, it's the war for the restoration of a cultural ideal of prewar domestic peace that drives much of the series. Of course, Manhattan realizes that ideal domestic life was never quite ideal, and that a return to this imagined sociocultural way of living is ultimately impossible. But damned if Los Alamos doesn't do its best to provide a simulacra of the suburban idyll. There's a town council to make decisions about daily life, a market for shopping and gossip, a bar for light-hearted debauchery. There is also a strict monitoring of both internal and external communication; as much as the citizens are free to conduct themselves as typical suburbanites, they are simultaneously trapped within the army's purview. Domesticity is no longer their own, and the intimacy of family and friendship is not so private as it might seem.