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—
- 115: SPACE
with A Sometimes
114: NO THEME 13
with J Toledo & C Tse
113: INVISIBLE WALLS
with A Walker & D Disney
112: TREAT
with T Dearborn
111: BABY
with S Deo & L Ferney
110: POP!
with Z Frost & B Jessen
109: NO THEME 12
with C Maling & N Rhook
108: DEDICATION
with L Patterson & L Garcia-Dolnik
107: LIMINAL
with B Li
106: OPEN
with C Lowe & J Langdon
105: NO THEME 11
with E Grills & E Stewart
104: KIN
with E Shiosaki
103: AMBLE
with E Gomez and S Gory
102: GAME
with R Green and J Maxwell
101: NO THEME 10
with J Kinsella and J Leanne
100: BROWNFACE
with W S Dunn
99: SINGAPORE
with J Ip and A Pang
97 & 98: PROPAGANDA
with M Breeze and S Groth
96: NO THEME IX
with M Gill and J Thayil
95: EARTH
with M Takolander
94: BAYT
with Z Hashem Beck
93: PEACH
with L Van, G Mouratidis, L Toong
92: NO THEME VIII
with C Gaskin
91: MONSTER
with N Curnow
90: AFRICAN DIASPORA
with S Umar
89: DOMESTIC
with N Harkin
88: TRANSQUEER
with S Barnes and Q Eades
87: DIFFICULT
with O Schwartz & H Isemonger
86: NO THEME VII
with L Gorton
85: PHILIPPINES
with Mookie L and S Lua
84: SUBURBIA
with L Brown and N O'Reilly
83: MATHEMATICS
with F Hile
82: LAND
with J Stuart and J Gibian
81: NEW CARIBBEAN
with V Lucien
80: NO THEME VI
with J Beveridge
57.1: EKPHRASTIC
with C Atherton and P Hetherington
57: CONFESSION
with K Glastonbury
56: EXPLODE
with D Disney
55.1: DALIT / INDIGENOUS
with M Chakraborty and K MacCarter
55: FUTURE MACHINES
with Bella Li
54: NO THEME V
with F Wright and O Sakr
53.0: THE END
with P Brown
52.0: TOIL
with C Jenkins
51.1: UMAMI
with L Davies and Lifted Brow
51.0: TRANSTASMAN
with B Cassidy
50.0: NO THEME IV
with J Tranter
49.1: A BRITISH / IRISH
with M Hall and S Seita
49.0: OBSOLETE
with T Ryan
48.1: CANADA
with K MacCarter and S Rhodes
48.0: CONSTRAINT
with C Wakeling
47.0: COLLABORATION
with L Armand and H Lambert
46.1: MELBOURNE
with M Farrell
46.0: NO THEME III
with F Plunkett
45.0: SILENCE
with J Owen
44.0: GONDWANALAND
with D Motion
43.1: PUMPKIN
with K MacCarter
43.0: MASQUE
with A Vickery
42.0: NO THEME II
with G Ryan
41.1: RATBAGGERY
with D Hose
41.0: TRANSPACIFIC
with J Rowe and M Nardone
40.1: INDONESIA
with K MacCarter
40.0: INTERLOCUTOR
with L Hart
39.1: GIBBERBIRD
with S Gory
39.0: JACKPOT!
with S Wagan Watson
38.0: SYDNEY
with A Lorange
37.1: NEBRASKA
with S Whalen
37.0: NO THEME!
with A Wearne
36.0: ELECTRONICA
with J Jones