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How shall we remember you?
You were a whole island, once. You were breadfruit trees heavy with green globes of fruit whispering promises of massive canoes. Crabs dusted with white sand scuttled through pandanus roots. Beneath looming coconut trees beds of ripe watermelon slept still, swollen with juice. And you were protected by powerful irooj, chiefs birthed from women who could swim pregnant for miles beneath a full moon.
Then you became testing ground. Nine nuclear weapons consumed you, one by one by one, engulfed in an inferno of blazing heat. You became crater, an empty belly. Plutonium ground into a concrete slurry filled your hollow cavern. You became tomb. You became concrete shell. You became solidified history, immoveable, unforgettable.
—From the poem "Dome Poem Part III: Annointed" by Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner1
At the core of Quantum Field Theory, a theory of nature's transience, is the radical undoing of the separation between being and nothingness. Time is out of joint. It is diffracted, broken apart, exploded, scattered in multiple directions. Each moment is an infinite multiplicity where other moments are here-now in particular constellations. "Now" is not an infinitesimal slice, but an infinitely rich condensed node in a changing field diffracted across spacetime.2
The Dome
Let us begin at the "end." With an island that has been given the colonializing title "the end of the Earth."3 Here we find a dome. This dome has been dubbed both the "most toxic place on Earth" and an "Edenic paradise." Here at the crossroads between nuclear and climate catastrophes is the end of the time… and the beginning.
The dome is located in the Marshall Islands, on a chain of islands called Enewetak Atoll. Few Americans have heard of Enewetak, though some recall something about Bikini. Bikini Atoll is associated in the American imagination, if it is at all, with the "first and only" thermonuclear bomb test—but it was neither the first nor the only one. The particular thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb test that got so much fanfare was 1000 times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The eerie sci-fi cloud of the Bravo test lingers, though the fact that it was one of 23 nuclear bombs exploded at Bikini has long faded....