Living through Atomization: Runit Dome, Radioactive Matter, and Poetry of Digestion

Abstract

Even after a nuclear blast life continues to unfurl its leaves —Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner (“Of Islands and Elders”) In a view from above, a mosaiced gray dome lies amid green low-lying vegetation. Over 377 feet in diameter, this strange concrete object disrupts the beach’s smooth stretch of sandy greenery, not unlike an unidentified flying object that has made a furtive landing. In the surrounding ocean lies a blue hole, nearly identical in size and shape as the dome, like a sibling. Indeed, they are from the same series of nuclear weapons that the United States detonated in the Marshall Islands between 30 June 1946 and 18 August 1958, which included Castle Bravo, a hydrogen bomb approximately a thousand times more devastating than Little Boy, the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima (Walsh and Heine 298). Situated in the Runit Island as a part of the Enewetak Atoll, the disk and the hole function as a visual reminder of the ways in which these detonations permanently altered the environment and its residents.