By Stuart Rosebrook, Ph.D.

From 1945 to 1964, the United States, the U.S.S.R, the United Kingdom, France and China set off approximately 663 nuclear tests above ground into our world’s atmosphere, with the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. respectively testing 356 and 212 nuclear weapons between 1955 and 1964. The U.S. alone, according to the “Baby Tooth” exhibit at the St. Louis branch of the Missouri Historical Society, “conducted almost 200 nuclear tests between 1945 and 1958, most of them above ground” at atomic blast sites in Nevada (the Trinity site in New Mexico was the first in 1945). Fallout from the bombs “showered the country with nuclear radiation.” The West and Midwest were both particularly hard-hit and “cancer causing radiation seeped into the air, water, and even milk supply, as cows ate contaminated grass.”

One woman, St. Louis physician Louise Reiss, led the formation of the Greater St. Louis Citizens’ Committee for Nuclear Information in 1958. Reiss was inspired by Johns Hopkins University biochemist Dr. Herman Kalckar’s 1958 article on baby teeth in Nature, “The official public health agencies of every nation…should organize a large-scale collection of milk teeth…and conduct measurements of radioactivity on this material.”