Six-and-a-half decades ago, midway through World War II, the United States Army was charged with assembling a team of young American and British physicists, working intensively, under the leadership of their colleague J. Robert Oppenheimer, in what came to be called the Manhattan Project, to harness nuclear energy and craft a powerful weapon as a defense against Nazi Germany's threat of world domination.

Oppenheimer situated his laboratory in a secret location at Los Alamos, in New Mexico, and in 1945, when Germany had already surrendered and Japan was teetering, the team of scientists was ready to test the first plutonium bomb, deemed powerful enough to annihilate all humanity. Oppenheimer, an intellectual and aesthete, and other sensitive individuals among his colleagues were horrified that the U.S. government had changed the course of their mission and planned to employ their creation offensively and, without first issuing a warning and ultimatum, bomb civilians in cities in Japan. The misgivings of Oppenheimer and others, concerning the enormity of the "gadget" they had built and how its use would be perverted, earned them the government's mistrust.

The circumstances surrounding the development and testing of the original nuclear weapon would not immediately seem to lend themselves to operatic treatment. But from this unconventional subject, composer John Adams and librettist-and director of the original production-Peter Sellars have fashioned, in "Dr. Atomic" (2005), a thought-provoking, haunting opera of disturbing pertinence, the sensitivity of its questioning protagonists contrasting sharply with the attitudes of current hawkish leaders, who might blithely have annihilated us all, and a would-be successor who casually sings, as a joke, "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran." The Metropolitan Opera gave "Dr. Atomic," already performed in San Francisco, the Netherlands, and Chicago, its local premiere on October 13. This review is based on the October 21 performance, the third of nine Met hearings.

The varied, often ominous sounds of Adams' "Dr. Atomic" range from electronic and minimalist to bel canto, ritual chanting, and passages that call to mind music of Richard Strauss and Benjamin Britten. For his text, Sellars drew on such diverse sources as histories of the Manhattan Project, memoirs and biographies of its participants; poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Baudelaire, translated by Michael Hamburger; and John Donne; "Songs of the Tewa," the New Mexico Native American tribe displaced by the Manhattan Project, translated by Herbert Joseph Spinden; and the "Bhagavad Gita," translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood.

New to the Met and taking over as New York Philharmonic Music Director next season, conductor Alan Gilbert galvanizes the disparate elements of Adams' score into a brooding, eloquent statement, taut with tension, as performed by the striking cast, chorus and soloists. Penny Woolcock makes her Met debut directing this gripping new production, with evocative designs by Julien Crouch (sets), Catherine Zuber (costumes), Brian MacDevitt (lighting), Leo Warner and Mark Grimmer for Fifty Nine Productions Ltd. (video), and Mark Grey (sound). Andrew Dawson devised the choreography. The bomb, an aptly monstrous contraption, and debris from fallout loom over cloth suggestions of mountains and desert throughout. A vivid vision of Vishnu, Hindu preserver god, involving fierce winged, horned, clawed and beaked creatures, comes just before the climax of the opera.

Baritone Gerald Finley, realizing the complex figure of Oppenheimer, who named the bomb-testing site "Trinity," graphically and lyrically wrestles with his demons in the aria, after Donne's sonnet, "Batter my heart, three person'd God" to conclude Act One, and, in a notable departure from the grimness that predominates, exchanges poetic words with young mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, as Kitty, his spouse, in a rhapsodic romantic scene. Contemplating elusive peace, as she considers what this war effort is doing to her mate and their marriage, sends Cooke's Kitty into flights of coloratura in arias "Those who most long for peace now pour their lives on war" and "Wary of time O it seizes the soul tonight." Cooke acquits herself well indeed in her first major Met assignment.

Bass-baritone Eric Owens, new to the company and sonorous as General Leslie Groves, the 'heavy,' determined to tame both unruly scientists and uncooperative weather and test the bomb on schedule, shows a vulnerable side as well: chocolate cake and brownies are his undoing as he struggles to handle the pressure. Earth mother contralto Meredith Arwady makes an impressive debut as Pasqualita, the Oppenheimers' maid, sagely offering the Tewa take on the intruders and their mission in defiance of Nature.

Outstanding as scientists and soldiers, who give Groves agita as they air their angst, are Richard Paul Fink, irreverent as Edward Teller, ready with gallows humor and a wry comment; newcomer Thomas Glenn as Robert Wilson, who would petition President Harry S. Truman not to drop the bomb on the Japanese without "mak[ing] clear the terms of peace and giv[ing] them a chance to surrender;" Earle Patriarco as Chief Meteorologist Frank Hubbard, who warns against the danger of testing the bomb during an electrical storm; and Roger Honeywell, new here as Army Medical Corps Captain James Nolan, with a dire warning about the toxic effects of plutonium.

Remaining performances of "Dr. Atomic" are on October 25 at 8:30 p.m. and 30 at 8 p.m., and November 1 at 8:30 p.m., 5 at 8 p.m., 8 at 1 p.m., and 13 at 8 p.m. Tickets from $15 to 375 are available by going to www.metopera.org calling 212/362-6000, or visiting the Met box office at Lincoln Center. $20 rush tickets are available at the box office on the day of performance.