Between the time of its publication and fourth revise they exploded the bomb they called Vanya over Novaya Zemlya—its fireball five miles wide hung a second sun over the island—its cloud rose into the mesosphere—black rain over the Kara Sea, Barents Sea, Alaska, Norway, Finland, the Ukraine, northern Canada—lines leading back to the closed cities—to Arzamas-16 (Sarov), to Chelyabinsk-70 (Snezhinsk), near the Mayak site where they loosed the radioactive waste into Lake Karachay, Lake Irtyash, into the Techa river, past the villages, to the Arctic Sea—its radioactive cloud moving northeast over Berydanish, Satlykovo, out to Tygish—Between the time of its publication and fourth revise they exploded the bomb they called Starfish Prime off Johnston Atoll over French Frigate Shoals, high inside the thermosphere—Its aurora—a blinding white flash, green sphere of light, vast cloud outflung in turning arcs, in circles sweeping outwards—flared across the earth’s magnetic field lines, debris lighting the sky from Taraw, on the equator, down to Apia, Wellington, Tongatapu, Campbell Island—trapping radiation along the field lines, irradiating the satellites TELSTAR, KOSMOS, ARIEL—the classified ‘national reconnaisance satellites’ ZENIT, CORONA, gridding the earth in rectangles of film—Its fallout rained over the world—Between the time of its publication and fourth revise they exploded plutonium over the salt-bush scrub of Maralinga, at Taranaki, north of the straight train line across the Nullabor, in secret trials they had named Operation Tims and Operation Vixen—its plumes, a hundred miles long, drifted on the wind—They had taken the sacred objects, trucked the people south across the rail line to the coast at Yalata—She said, ‘Where are we going? We are going to a place we have never been to’—Some people walked, leaving sand tracks in the desert for the people left behind—lines leading back to Calder Hall at Windscale on the grey Irish Sea—Between the time of its first publication and fourth revise they exploded the bomb they called ‘Storax Sedan’ underground at the Nevada Test Site, as part of their Peaceful Nuclear Explosions program, lifting a dome of earth 90 metres above the desert floor—more than twelve million tonnes of earth exploding outwards, a radioactive cloud separating into two, drifting north-east and then east over Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, Illinois, across to the Atlantic—In Las Vegas people watched the explosions at the Test Site from their hotel windows, put on their radiation badges and sat outside—its clouds spreading between the Cascade and Rocky Mountain Ranges—They collected the children’s teeth for a study—Between the time of its publication and fourth revise they exploded the bomb they called Bighorn over Christmas Island (Kiritimati) in their year-long Dominic series of thirty-one nuclear explosions over the ‘Pacific Proving Ground’—filmed with EG&G Inc. rapatronic cameras, at 2400 frames a second, at one frame a minute—capturing its fireball, sun-like until its shockwave, rebounding off the ground, smashed into it, a cloud—a film-like sequence of high-speed photographs—‘the critical information needed to build better bombs’—lines leading back to Los Alamos, to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, to Hanford in sage-bush country on the Columbia river—Between the time of its first publication and fourth revise they exploded more than a hundred atmospheric bombs at the Semipalatinsk Test Site (the Polygon) in Kazakhstan, south of the valley of the River Irtysh, out to the Karagandy Ranges, south as far as Degelen Mountain, east to Chagan, where the river bends—testing them on purpose-built apartments, bridges, underground metro stations, trucks, planes—black winds over the industrial city of Ust-Kamenogorsky, Znamamenka and the Kazakh steppes, the towns and villages—at Dispensary No. 4 (IRME) they studied its effects on the local people and their newborn children—She said, ‘Like hair burning—the smell came back from the earth each time it rained’—Between the time of its first publication and fourth revise they fired the thermonuclear warhead they called Operation K from Kapustin Yar south of Stalingrad (Volgograd) towards the Sary Shagan test range, detonating it in the troposphere south-west of Zhezqazghan—a pulse so strong it fused buried power cables for six-hundred miles—Between the time of its first publication and fourth revise they exploded the fourth of their Gerboise bombs over Reggane’s ‘Sahara Centre for Military Experiments’—a vast flash, an enormous ball of bluish fire, red at its centre, a cloud carried on the desert wind—That same year, they started on their nuclear test series with jewel names in the granite mountains at In Eker—the desert base they named Oasis 2, invisible from the road, east of Tan Affela—where during ‘Operation ‘Béryl’ the steel door of the tunnels exploded into the air on a rush of flame—its ochre-coloured cloud turning to black over the desert, drifting eastwards—The chief of the armies fled that night—they had brought in crates of guinea pigs—they had the soldiers crawl across the Forward Zone—Between the time of its publication and fourth revise—