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The war still raged in the Pacific, although there was no longer a clear need to overpower Japan with the most deadly force ever devised. Germany had recently surrendered to the Allies, and that day, President Truman was to meet with the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin in Potsdam, Germany. The test at the Trinity site had to go off as scheduled the early morning of July 16, 1945.

You are, operatically and in actual fact, there. There, the bomb was developed in top secrecy during World War II in a rush to beat the Nazis to nuclear weaponry, and it’s where atomic weapons are still being produced. When the night is clear and the back of the stage is open to the enchanting desert, as it is in this production, you can see the distant twinkling lights of the Los Alamos laboratories. The outdoor opera house is only partly protected from the elements. Just such a violent desert thunderstorm came out of nowhere Thursday night during a Santa Fe Opera performance of John Adams’ “Doctor Atomic,” which dramatizes and provides uniquely essential insight into the most disquieting scientific event in history. Lightning, some scientists feared, might trigger a cosmic chain reaction igniting the Earth’s atmosphere.

An unpredictable warm air mass capable of producing a violent thunderstorm could blow radiation fallout to nearby populations. The weather was nervous-making that summer evening 73 years ago when the first atomic bomb was tested at a remote desert site a little more than 200 miles south of here.