Cold War Nukes Testing Brings Cancer To Baby Boomers

Photo by flickr user <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/epicfireworks/3542212906/sizes/o/">EpicFireworks</a> used under a <a href="http://www.creativecommons.org">Creative Commons</a> license.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


In case you missed it, Politics Daily published a disturbing piece by Walter Shapiro about a new study showing that millions of baby boomers face a greater risk of cancer thanks to Cold War-era nuclear testing.

Shapiro’s piece centers on the startling findings of Joseph Mangano, an epidemiologist who analyzed baby teeth from children born in the St. Louis area of Missouri between 1959 and 1961. He found that subjects who had twice the normal amount of Strontium-90 in their infant teeth had since died of cancer. His detective work eventually traced the Strontium-90 to nuclear test sites hundreds of miles away.

Mangano demonstrated how detonations in the Nevadan desert between 1951 and 1962 propelled radioactive chemicals into the atmosphere, which were then blown all over the country by the wind and returned to the ground by precipitation—infiltrating the water supply, grazing areas for cows, as well as orchards, farms and other sources of food. (Mangano believes the St. Louis children were most likely affected by contaminated cow milk—bottle feeding was in vogue at the time.) Mangano’s explosive findings didn’t receive the reaction you might expect: Shapiro was the only reporter who showed up at the press conference. You can read the entire study here.

Fact:

Mother Jones was founded as a nonprofit in 1976 because we knew corporations and billionaires wouldn't fund the type of hard-hitting journalism we set out to do.

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2022 demands.

payment methods

Fact:

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2022 demands.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate