i. First food
Girdled in glass, suspended in water, single cells
single or chaining, crystalline flowers, diatoms
fix carbon, give us 50 percent of the oxygen we breathe,
synthesize sunlight to sugar, first food for the whole web of us.
Here it says diatoms take up cesium-137, confusing it for potassium.
Radioactive cesium-137, created only in nuclear explosions, has been carried by winds to every place on earth.
/something of one forever out of reach
ii. Salt
Potassium is a salt diatoms can use.
Remember SALT, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks in the 1970s, between the United States and the Soviet Union, to limit the number of nuclear weapons that each could produce and own.
We drop treaties like glass, if we hold them at all.
iii. Trust
A moratorium on nuclear weapon testing was first proposed by the Soviet Union in 1955, and again in March, 1958
/everything is complexified
The United States rejected the Soviet’s proposals because it did not trust the Soviet Union.
iv. Layers, Crossings
In March 1958, the sailboat Golden Rule, a small ketch, set out from California for the Pacific Proving Grounds to protest against nuclear testing. But the U.S. Coast Guard arrested them in waters off Honolulu on April 25. What if Golden Rule had made it to Enewetak?
In March 1958, my father’s ship, U.S.S. Lawrence County, received a change in orders, to substitute for another ship with mechanical failure. Dad’s ship left Honolulu on April 30 for Enewetak Atoll and hydrogen bomb testing. Had he seen Golden Rule in the harbor? Had he heard about the crew’s protest and arrest?
In June, while my dad was at Enewetak, another protest boat, Phoenix, set sail in place of Golden Rule. On July 1, she made it 65 miles into the bomb test area before she was arrested.
Lawrence County left Enewetak on June 22, after twelve nuclear tests, to return to Honolulu on July 4.
I like to think Lawrence County and Phoenix crossed course.
v. I wouldn’t call it war
The Conference on the Discontinuance of Nuclear Weapon Tests began October 31, 1958
A moratorium, not a treaty, on nuclear weapon testing by the Soviet Union, United States and United Kingdom began November 4, 1958
/and nothing is not complexified
Q: Do diatoms war?
A: “We see diatoms do have tussles under the microscope. I wouldn’t call it war, but they have different characteristics, wants and needs that let them outcompete their neighbors.”
The Conference on the Discontinuance of Nuclear Weapon Tests concluded in 1962 after a nearly continuous three-year session, without achieving a Treaty
vi. Words, Fixes
Surely, I’m naïve. Wrong about the new species of diatoms in nuclear cooling ponds. They’re not mutations, not microscopic godzillas. “Discovered” beings and things have usually been there all along, in their all-along functions and shapes.
And “receive” and “give” are human words for cellular “admit” and “expel.”
Maybe as an ion pump, potassium (or mistaken cesium-137) helps diatoms gather silica bits from water into itself, where it can link them together to make its glass exoskeleton.
Something like human bodies use silica to make collagen, to make bones.
“Resilience,” another human word. Microorganisms need light, nutrients, trace elements. Diatoms divide quickly in warm water. Nuclear fission, the splitting of atoms, is named after biological fission, the division of cells. If we’ve created a condition, in a hot nuclear cooling pond, say, that diatoms can capitalize on, they’re simply responding to the environment they find themselves in. It’s not resilience, not adaptation, it’s “I can do my biology faster now.”
But human cells, we don’t want them to divide faster.
We know a river can fix itself if you leave it alone long enough.
One of the fixes, over time, is burial.
vii. Isolation, Beauty
Cesium-137, becomes buried in layers of sediment, where it can decay in relative isolation.
Scientists drill into the bottoms of lakes and rivers to collect samples of sediment. To date the samples, they use cesium-137.
Something like how I use diatoms to understand water, the effects of radiation, and beauty – is it possible to comprehend beauty?
/glass architecture embellished with pilasters, spires
in thousands of designs, jeweled geometries
Scientists see cesium-137 as a graph of activity – a little like the graph of a heart monitor. A sediment sample is placed in a gamma-ray spectrometer. As the cesium decays within the spectrometer, radioactive energy bursts out with neutrons from the cesium’s unstable nucleus. That burst is translated into an electrical pulse which is recorded in terms of its height, or strength.
I imagined that diatoms carried cesium-137 within their glass walls. I thought scientists were dating the diatoms, but no, they’re dating the sediment. There’s cesium in the sediment, which is 20 or 30 percent dead diatoms, but it’s unclear if the cesium was actually held in the diatoms.
/is it necessary to understand beauty
The Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space, and Under Water, was signed by the Soviet Union, the United States and the United Kingdom on August 5, 1963
to protect beauty?
vii. Linked
Scientists compare their sediment reading to the clear global, composite line graph of cesium in nuclear fallout, significantly measurable from 1955 to 1963, when it peaks and drops sharply after the test ban treaty.
What if the U.S. scientists had shared their discoveries when they were developing the atomic bomb? The ethos of science is to share. Many scientists at the time argued that it was necessary to share with German scientists, with Soviet scientists, to prevent an arms race, to deter mistrust, possibly to stop the bomb altogether, right then. But, politically, politically, politically
This was during World War II, its perceived and real threats
let them outcompete
Maybe I’ve carried the analogy further than I should.
Single cell microorganisms can’t be compared to atoms;
I was dissuaded from the start. But I’m a poet,
I think through one thing to get at another.
Now the United States is ramping up its nuclear testing facilities.
So are Russia and China.
The heat of the first
Atomic bomb Trinity, when tested, turned
Nevada desert sand to green glass.
Some thought the test would prove the science.
Some thought the test would prove the weapon.
Some thought the test would prove the weapon should not be used.
But for that, the test would have had to have been shared, made public.
Normally, in science, if you don’t share your discovery – by publishing a paper, say – then it didn’t happen.
Not the same as military secrecy, but
One might say that Trinity didn’t happen until Little Boy did
To Hiroshima.
/something of us, everyone, everything, is forever girdled to that
sudden
after
Diatoms are so very small, one cell, photosynthesizing, light into oxygen, into energy,
When they divide, one glass jewel into two, two into four
They create more life.
When they bloom
/ outcompete
Use up all the silica in the water,
They die, fall,
Sometimes become silica for new diatoms,
Sometimes sediment.
All in earth’s design.
Thinking through diatoms, to get at atoms –
May be naïve, but I, brittle
And strong, am linked to each.
As citizen of the United States splitting
uranium, plutonium, I am vengeful death
And will not stop. As daughter, I hold my breath.
As woman, I have no country.
Nor do diatoms.
Because of diatoms I breathe.
—
Books by Su Love include Weight of Light, nominated for the Pushcart Editors’ Book Prize, and Buddha, Proof, a Minnesota Book Award finalist. Su’s sixth book concerns legacies of nuclear power in Minnesota and is supported by the Minnesota State Arts Board, Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, and St. Croix Watershed Research Station. Su has been a visiting writer at several colleges, universities and organizations including Salmon Literary Centre, Ireland, and American Space Madrid/Instituto Internacional. sulove.org.
