These tiny baby teeth helped St. Louis citizens win a great battle in the fight to reduce nuclear testing. In the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. and Soviet governments discharged nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, where radioactivity was widely dispersed with each explosion.
Teeth like this one proved that such tests had to stop. Members of the Greater St. Louis Citizens’ Committee for Nuclear Information knew that nuclear radiation caused genetic birth defects and diseases like cancer and wanted to demonstrate that airborne radiation could travel great distances. To do so, they began collecting baby teeth in 1959 to measure them for the dangerous radioactive isotope strontium-90, which occurs only as a result of nuclear reactions. The program’s director, Dr. Louise Reiss, encouraged parents to contribute their children’s baby teeth for testing.
The program collected about 320,000 teeth. Tests showed that the strontium-90 level in children’s teeth in 1963 was 50 times greater than in 1950—and that the levels rose and fell in correlation with atomic bomb tests. Using this information, President John F. Kennedy signed the international Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963.
Gift of Joe Mangano and the Radiation and Public Health Project