Doctor Atomic of July 16, 1945 (the day of the test). During the second act, time frequently slows down for the characters and then snaps back into reality. The opera ends in the final, prolonged moment before the bomb is detonated. Although the original commission for the opera suggested that U.S. physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the "father of the atomic bomb," be fashioned as a 20th-century Doctor Faustus, Adams and Sellars deliberately attempted to avoid this characterization. Alice Goodman worked for two years with Adams on the project before leaving, objecting to the characterization of Edward Teller, as dictated by the original
B61 nuclear bomb Mod 12. With reductions planned of nuclear weapons in Europe, which may retire the older Mod 3 and 4 and the Mod 10 already slated for retirement, and the possibility that European nations may not build or procure new aircraft to carry the Mod 12 would eliminate the need for consolidation into a new type. While the B83 nuclear bomb is not as old as the B61, the Pentagon sees it as a "relic of the Cold War," believing that deploying a megaton-yield gravity bomb, the highest level nuclear weapon left in the U.S. inventory, to Europe is "inconceivable" at