"Doctor Atomic" by John Adams October 11, 2005

From the San Francisco Opera: "July 1945. The war is in its final, terrible phase. Germany has surrendered but Japan will fight to the bitter end, costing possibly a half million casualties. In the New Mexico desert a group of young physicists, handpicked and led by the brilliant, complex J. Robert Oppenheimer, have labored furiously in a race against Hitler to develop the world's first atomic bomb. Now, in the hours before the first test explosion, they are confronted with the moral crisis of its inevitable use on Japanese citizens."