COUNTDOWN.(nuclear weapons)

At the northern end of the White Sands Missile Range, in the semi-arid desert of central New Mexico, a road stretches toward the charcoal-colored rockface of the Oscura Mountains, which rise to nearly nine thousand feet. At the end of the road is a neat circular shape, about a half mile in diameter. This is the site of the first atomic explosion, which took place on July 16, 1945. When the bomb went off, it obliterated the creosote bushes that had been growing here, along with every other living thing inside the circle. When plant life returned to the spot, grass and yucca plants took the place of the creosote. The change in vegetation explains why the site is visible from miles away, and probably from space.

White Sands is a mesmerizing place--an outdoor museum of mankind's highest ambitions and deepest fears. The missile range is still an active facility. Lately, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency has been using an area nearby to study the effects of explosives on underground bunkers. One corner of White Sands is occupied by linear, the Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research project, which scans the skies for errant asteroids, particularly those big enough to cause mass extinctions. At the same time, the range functions as an unofficial wildlife refuge, the secrecy of the place serving to protect various species. It is home to herds of oryx, an African antelope. They are noble animals with horns like medieval spikes, and they can go for extended periods without water.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man who oversaw the building of the first atomic bombs, called the test site Trinity, in honor of John Donne's sonnet "Batter my heart, three-person'd God." The poem contains the words "break, blow, burn, and make me new." Oppenheimer was made new by the explosion, or, at least, was not the same afterward. The terrain beneath the bomb--Ground Zero, it was called--also underwent a transformation, which scientists are still trying to understand. When Trinity personnel came back to inspect the site, they found a green, glassy substance covering the ground. The latest hypothesis is that this artificial mineral, which was named trinitite, formed when soil, water, and organic matter were lifted off the ground and fused in the heat of the blast. Over the years, tourists have carried away much of the trinitite in their pockets--the site is open to visitors twice a year--and most of the rest was buried beneath the soil. Looking down at the ground, you would never know that anything out of the ordinary had happened here.

What happened at Trinity is the subject of "Doctor Atomic," a new opera, with music by John Adams and a libretto by Peter Sellars. The opening scenes take place at Los Alamos, the headquarters of the Manhattan Project, two weeks before the test. The rest takes place on the night of July 15th-16th, in the hours leading up to the detonation. It will have its premiere at the San Francisco Opera on October 1st.

"Some people claim that it's the world's first countdown," Sellars said to me, in a hotel lobby in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a few days before the rehearsals for "Doctor Atomic" began. "Every second is charged, because it is a new thing in the history of time--this massive pressure behind every minute and every second in a way that never counted before. At the end of the opera, you can feel the passage of time in the most real way, as with the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, showing how many minutes remain until midnight. You get the hands of that clock, and inside every minute is a universe. A twenty-minute countdown takes forty minutes. From zero minus one minute up to the explosion takes four minutes. The music actually connects with the most formative experiences in your life, which you want to never live again yet you're living over and over--those moments when you were more alive than you ever were alive before or since. This is 'Gotterdammerung' for our generation, with our speed, with our tension points, with our nervous energy, but with nothing being a metaphor and everything being a reality."

Sellars--director of opera and theatre, activist, professor of "art as moral action" at U.C.L.A.--actually does talk like this. He speaks better than most writers write, moving through thickets of erudition toward exact epiphanies. His orations and incantations well up without warning, and break off with a giggle, or a profanity, or a burst of California slang. He has a compact, almost elfin body; his shoulders slope down sharply from his neck, and his feet pad the floor in short, quick steps. His hair shoots straight up, giving him the air of being perpetually electrified. He has a boyish quality, and dresses in boyish clothes. A typical ensemble may consist of cargo pants, an oversized flannel shirt, and a track jacket. Yet, when he is in the grip of one of his rhetorical tours de force, he takes on the look of an elderly sage: his head turns toward the heavens, his arms stretch upward in supplicant gestures, his face twists into an attitude of ecstatic pain. The blend of mental power and depth of feeling in one man is almost fearsome. But the most distinctive thing about him is his warmth: his customary way of greeting a stranger is to wrap him in a hug.

It was the peak of the atomic season--midway between the sixtieth anniversary of Trinity, on July 16th, and the sixtieth anniversary of Hiroshima, on August 6th. Books about Oppenheimer and the bomb were being published, seemingly, at the rate of one a week. Sellars, who was in town to direct a production of Osvaldo Golijov's "Ainadamar," at the Santa Fe Opera, pointed out that there were traces of atomic history all around: we were sitting a few hundred feet from 109 East Palace Avenue, the studiously inconspicuous front office for Los Alamos, where Dorothy McKibbin, Oppenheimer's gatekeeper, took in bewildered emigre physicists and sent them on the road to the laboratories, twenty-five miles to the northwest.