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
Soviet atomic bomb project were continuously published as public domain in academic journals. Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader, had mostly disregarded the atomic knowledge possessed by the Russian scientists and had most of the scientists working in the metallurgy and mining industry or serving in the Soviet Armed Forces technical branches during the World War II's eastern front in 1940–42. In 1940–42, Georgy Flyorov, a Russian physicist serving as an officer in the Soviet Air Force, noted that despite progress in other areas of physics, the German, British, and American scientists had ceased publishing papers on nuclear science; clearly they each had active secret