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
Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists The Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists (ECAS) was founded by Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd in 1946. Its aims were to warn the public of the dangers associated with the development of nuclear weapons, promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy, and ultimately work towards world peace, which was seen as the only way that nuclear weapons would not be used again. The Committee was established in the wake of the "Szilárd petition" (July 1945) to United States president Harry S. Truman opposing the use of the atomic bomb on moral grounds, which was signed