| Sumario: | This essay develops the element caesium as both a material substance and an organizing metaphor through which to theorize the entangled temporalities and spatialities of nuclear colonialism in the Pacific. Focusing on two isotopes—radiocaesium-137 and stable caesium-133—I argue that nuclear technologies produce a dual condition of atomically irradiated space and atomically standardized time that sustains U.S. geopolitical regimes of control. I show that 137Cs, as a long-lived, bioavailable contaminant, materializes the planetary scale of radioactive violence, whereas 133Cs—foundational to atomic clocks and Coordinated Universal Time—stabilizes a homogenized temporal order that underwrites imperial spatial organization. By placing the chronopolitics of atomic time in dialogue with the geographies of fallout, the essay reframes nuclear colonialism as a spacetime project rather than solely a spatial one. The essay concludes by drawing on Indigenous, decolonial, and feminist science studies—especially the work of Lou Cornum, Winona LaDuke, Mark Rifkin, and Karen Barad—to suggest that attending to the quantum indeterminacies of caesium opens speculative, relational, and reparative ways of imagining time, space, and responsibility beyond the rigid infrastructures of nuclear empire.
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