How Did Scientists Who Stole 1500 Bodies Win a Nobel Prize?

On the 16th of July 1945, the United States Army detonated the first nuclear bomb, a test weapon named “Trinity”. This flung the world into the Atomic Age, where the subsequent bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just the start of the nuclear weapons programme. Because of rising tensions between the Soviet Union and the US, and the increasing possibility of atomic warfare, the US ramped up its nuclear weapons testing, carrying out most of it in a designated area of Nevada.

Between 1945 and 1992, the United States recorded 1054 explosive nuclear tests, with 928 of these carried out at the Nevada test site. While 828 of these bombs were detonated underground, 100 of them were atmospheric tests. It took a while for serious flags to be raised about the risks that nuclear fallout might pose to the environment and to human health, so the atmospheric tests finally stopped in July 1962.

The following year, under President John F. Kennedy, the US, UK and Soviet Union signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty that banned nuclear test explosions in the atmosphere, underwater or in outer space. Testing could still be done if the debris was contained within the test country’s borders, so underground explosions carried on at the Nevada test site until 1992.

While there were obvious examples of the harm that atomic bombs caused when dropped directly onto targets, less thought was initially given to the fallout created by atmospheric testing. In 1953, a secret project commissioned by the United States Atomic Energy Commission and US Air Force Project Rand sought to measure the potential extent of nuclear fallout on the world’s population. Called “Project Sunshine”, this classified programme wasn’t fun and cheery as its name suggests. It was, in fact, very dark indeed.

Project Gabriel and Project Sunshine

Project Sunshine came about on the heels of a different study named Project Gabriel. While the name “Gabriel” has angelic and heavenly connotations, this study, which started in 1949, was all about nuclear fallout. Originally headed by theoretical physicist Dr. Nicholas Smith on behalf of the Atomic Energy Commission, he determined that:

the number of nominal atomic bombs required to reach lethal levels of residual radioactivity on 10% of the earth’s surface is in the order of (ten to the fifth power) under expected circumstances.

In case you were asleep that day in maths class, 10 to the fifth power is 100,000. Basically, Smith concluded that it would take the detonation of 100,000 atomic bombs akin to the one dropped on Nagasaki to spell the end of the world, or to render the earth’s surface uninhabitable for humans. That might make you breathe a sigh of relief, because, let’s face it, 100,000 is a large number and apparently there are only around 12,500 nuclear warheads on the planet right now. But wait, he goes on to say:

This estimate may be 100 times too low or 10 times too high.

If it’s the latter, uh-oh!

Project Gabriel went a bit quiet for a couple of years but was later revived amid the increasing number of nuclear tests that were happening. A 1953 status report on Gabriel goes into a bit more detail about known unknowns stating:

Limitations in our knowledge of the physical and biological properties of the radioactive products of a nuclear weapon, together with inherent uncertainties as to the conditions which might be involved in the use of such a weapon, impose a high degree of uncertainty on estimates of this nature.

Sounds like they’re just pissing in the wind here. There’s also a massive difference between how many nukes it would take to kill off the human race and how many it would take to literally destroy the planet, however, Project Gabriel was concerned with the fallout of radioactive materials and the consequences this would have on a population. It was discovered that about the worst thing to come out of a nuke is a highly radioactive isotope called Strontium 90. This is a man-made isotope as it’s created through nuclear fission.

There is a natural metal called strontium, but this is not radioactive.

While Strontium 90 is used for medical and industrial purposes today, this is only in tiny amounts and is used in controlled conditions. Want to know how lots of Strontium-90 came to be dispersed over wide areas to sink into the soil, enter the food chain and our bodies and generally hang around the environment? Yes, that would be thanks to the atmospheric nuclear testing heydays of the 1950s and 60s. Cheers, guys.

And when Project Gabriel was in progress, they didn’t have the calculations quite right. In the early 50s, it was believed that, given a uniform distribution, one megaton of fission would produce 1 millicurie of Strontium 90 per square mile. This sounds like a tiny amount and indeed, a report on Project Sunshine from 1953 updates this to say that it would actually need 2 megatons of fission to produce that amount. However, later in the report, it states:

Later studies by the Atomic Energy Commission’s Division of Biology and Medicine corroborate the identification of (Strontium 90) as the most important long-range contaminant.(…) A nuclear detonation will produce 1 gram of (Strontium 90) per kiloton of yield energy, or 20 grams per 20-KT ‘nominal’ bomb. This is a considerable quantity.

So did the tests produce hardly any strontium 90 or loads of it? I think the evidence bears out that it was way more than 1 millicurie per 2 megatons. Another thing scientists initially got wrong was the half-life of the isotope. Original calculations were based on a half-life of 19.9 years.

This is the length of time it takes for an amount of Strontium 90 to decay down to half its original value, so it was thought that it would take around 20 years for the levels of Strontium 90 in the environment to reduce by half. Later research put this at 27.7 years and the most up to date number puts it at 29 years. Basically, this radioactive material hangs around for a long time, whether in the atmosphere, or leaching into the soil where it then enters our food and water supplies.

Projects such as Gabriel and, later, Sunshine, had to try and work out real-world scenarios for issues arising from the levels of radioactive fallout in the world. Generalisations and uniform calculations for the whole human race wouldn’t be that useful, as the amount of fallout would be greater nearer where the tests were carried out. Differences in how much natural strontium there was in an area, as well as how people farmed, what people ate and diseases certain groups were more susceptible to, also factor into how vulnerable a population would be to exposure to an increased level of this contaminating material.

It was at this stage in the proceedings when Project Sunshine was created. In 1953, it spun off from Project Gabriel with the intent to study the actual impact of radioactive fallout on humans. On the face of it, this doesn’t sound particularly controversial. We’d been experimenting with new technology and needed to find out more about the can of worms we’d exploded all over the place in a very cavalier manner.

Why then, was Sunshine a secret project for its first few years? Well, it’s all due to one particular property of Strontium 90: it’s a bone seeker.

Strontium 90 and You

Here’s why Strontium-90 is bad for humans. We already know it’s radioactive but it’s also chemically very similar to Calcium and so behaves in a similar way. You may remember Calcium from such body parts as teeth and bones.

Well, when Strontium 90 enters the body, either by inhalation or by ingestion through food or water, it seeks out the bones and teeth and our dumb bodies welcome it in, thinking that Calcium is looking a little different today, but maybe it’s just wearing a new hat or something. The radioactive isotope deposits itself directly onto bones and enters bone marrow, so therefore can cause cancer of the bone marrow, the bone, and soft tissues surrounding it. These days it can be used to treat bone tumours, but back in the 1950s and 60s when nuclear testing introduced it into the atmosphere, and basically the entire environment due to underwater and also underground tests, nobody knew what the effects on humans was going to be, either in the short or long term.

When studies such as Project Gabriel identified Strontium 90 as the main cause for concern, other studies, namely Project Sunshine, began to hone in more on this particular aspect. Under the auspices of the United States Atomic Energy Commission and US Air Force Project Rand, Project Sunshine needed to come up with a way of measuring the amounts or concentrations of Strontium 90 in human bodies across the globe. Because of the way the human body develops, Strontium-90 is much more easily absorbed by babies and young children, due to their growing bones. It’s kind of hard to get plentiful bone samples from this age group, however, so this is where our story takes a dark turn, as Project Sunshine used the bones of stillborn and dead children from across the world under a cloak of secrecy that, in some cases, wasn’t discovered for over 50 years.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Here are the main players in Project Sunshine:

• John C. Bugher, Director of the Division of Biology and Medicine of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission,
• Dr. J. Laurence Kulp, who was professor of geochemistry at Columbia University at the time, and
• the University of Chicago’s Dr. Willard Libby who was a professor of Chemistry in the Institute for Nuclear Studies and the leader of the study when it began.

On August 6th, 1953, Project Sunshine produced a report titled “Worldwide effects of Atomic Weapons” where they gave details such as the calculated Maximum Permissible Concentration, or MPC, of Strontium-90 in the body. Because research on this was still in its infancy, a suggested MPC of one microcurie is used, as this is the figure given a couple of years earlier by the International Commission on Radiological Protection. We don’t use the term “maximum permissible concentration” anymore, but one millionth of a curie is a tiny amount, so it basically means that any Strontium-90 is bad news, as it sticks around in the body for a very long time, giving off radiation as it decays. However, one conclusion of the report states:

In considering a worldwide population exposure we must remember that children are at risk, that the total years of exposure are also greater, and that a safety factor that is acceptable for say, one hundred thousand people might not be acceptable for three billion people. In summary then, it would seem that, from the medical point of view, there are enough uncertainties in the picture to indicate that the presently accepted maximum permissible body burden may have to be lowered.

The study started off easily enough. Samples were needed from water, soil, animals and humans from various areas, which ended up being as follows:

• Northern Utah or southwestern Idaho, as this was deemed to be a maximum fallout area;
• Kansas or Iowa which experienced less fallout but was an important grain-growing region;
• New England, especially the Boston area, as there was existing data about radioactivity in the water system which I don’t really want to think about;
• South America, as it was in the Southern hemisphere for comparison;
• England as another comparison point as it had low exposure but available samples, and;
• Japan, for obvious reasons i.e. having recently had a couple of atomic bombs dropped directly onto cities.

The report says: “Japan, Area 6 is included because excellent arrangements are presently in effect there for obtaining human specimens from all age groups.”

This sounds very convenient and efficient until you take a step back and remember they’re talking about dead people here.

To begin with, only a total of 36 samples of human material, livestock, “foodstuffs” such as egg shells, cow’s milk and what is described as “feces, human, pooled”, water and soil are taken from each area, meaning that the worldwide sample total was 216.

The human material was broken down into age categories. Samples of parts of ribs and also two teeth from each age group were taken and it was actually bone ash that was used in the experiments to measure Strontium-90 i.e. the bones were incinerated first. It is later more specifically stated that researchers should “collect rib bone samples from autopsies by age groups 0 to 10, 10 to 20, 20 and over.”

You might have been wondering why teeth weren’t a bigger factor in the experiments, given that they absorbed Strontium-90 and are falling out or being removed all the time and you don’t have to be dead to donate them. Personally, I am awash with my children’s milk teeth and have no idea what to do with them. Well, there was a later study that we’ll come on to, but as regards Sunshine, here’s what the report said:

Previous discussion provides good argument that bone is an excellent collector and integrator of strontium. Thus the suggestion that bone specimens be used. Tooth specimens are also suggested, primarily to determine if they may not also provide concentration of strontium. The literature does not agree on this. If teeth are proved useful indicators, they will be more readily available for future studies than human bone.

So basically at this point they’re saying thanks but no thanks on the teeth front.

As we just said, it’s much harder to get bone samples than teeth samples, which is why the studies took place in more urban areas as there was easier access to larger hospitals and personal connections were used to get bone samples from places like medical schools. The report states:

Inasmuch as human samples are important in all phases of the investigation, it is desirable to have at least one sample available during the early stages of the experimental program. Arrangements for such human bone samples from the Boston area have already been made by A.K. Solomon of the Harvard Medical School.

Later it mentions: “The collection of samples will undoubtedly be expedited and the quality of sampling much improved if an individual associated with the study travels to the foreign place to supervise sample collection. Such personal contact will undoubtedly improve the efficiency of sample collection for domestic cases too.”

The report also mentions the importance of medically trained staff “who can properly collect and segregate the specimens desired.”

Later on, it says that the stated 36 samples to be collected per area is just the minimum quantity, so the more the merrier.

As research progressed, it soon became clear that more human bone samples were needed than originally thought which is where the morally dodgy dealings, official secrecy and an infamous soundbite come in, as what the issue with Project Sunshine boils down to is that the remains of dead babies were stolen and tested without the knowledge or consent of their families.

In 1954, the US detonated Castle Bravo, which, at 1000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, is still the most powerful nuclear device the US has ever detonated. To be fair, it wasn’t intended to be as powerful as it ended up being, but unforeseen reactions and wind patterns meant it was over two and a half times bigger than anticipated, with ten million tons of coral vaporized, nearby inhabited atolls affected by radiation and a fallout cloud that was 100 miles or 160 km wide. Radioactive particles and gases from the detonation were detected across Europe, the US, Australia, India, basically the entire world.

With the dangerous nature of Strontium-90 already known, it became even more important for researchers to find suitable testing materials. While it’s a sad fact that children and infants die, you can probably agree that most grieving parents would not give the go-ahead for parts of their deceased babies to be tested for something that’s wholly a man-made issue. That’s when the term “body snatching” officially entered the Project Sunshine chat.

It seems pretty incredible now that such a term would be used, and put into the official record several times. The word “snatching” implies illegally, or at least covertly, taking the body or remains without other people knowing about it. And this is exactly what happened. In some cases, parents did not know what had happened to their stillborn babies.

Even people working within the Sunshine network in hospitals didn’t know what they were providing samples for. Exhumations were also carried out, however I couldn’t find any information on how many there might have been, so I guess we can add grave robbing to the list of shocking actions.

When the project came to light, it turned out that rather than being a secret program in order to protect nuclear secrets or research findings, it was a secret program because there would likely have been a huge public backlash. It was basically just to keep the bad publicity at bay. This was also a hindrance, however, as per Sunshine’s original remit:

A decision to keep the existence of a worldwide assay SECRET has limited the freedom with which suitable combinations of samples might be obtained from foreign countries.

In 1953, back in the early days of Sunshine, lawyers had been tasked by the Air Force’s Research and Development think tank, known as RAND, to research “the law of body snatching”.

Dr Willard Libby said in a biophysics conference a couple of years later in 1955:

I don’t know how to snatch bodies. In the original study on the Sunshine at Rand (…) in the summer of 1953, we hired an expensive law firm to look up the law of body snatching. This compendium is available to you. It is not very encouraging. It shows you how very difficult it is going to be to do legally.

So, reading between the lines, it seems that maybe they didn’t really go about doing this in an entirely above board manner.

There were some weasel words used, especially by Robert A. Dudley who worked in the biophysics branch of the AEC’s division of biology and medicine.

He had various contacts in the medical world and believed that leveraging those relationships would help keep a steady supply of bone and tissue samples flowing. Whether the people obtaining the samples for him knew why they were doing it - ehhhhh, that was really besides the point. In a letter Dudley wrote to Willard Libby in 1953, he stated:

Dr. Bugher still wishes that the initial security specifications be maintained. We are therefore making our collections under these conditions: The stated purpose of the collection is to be for a survey of the natural [Radium] burden of human bones(…)there are still enough uncertainties regarding threshold dose for injury(…)to provide a plausible explanation for further surveys … As for the emphasis on infants, we can say that such samples are easy to obtain here, and that we would like to keep our foreign collections comparable.

Later in 1953, Dudley wrote to Dr. Shields Warren, a former colleague who was then working at a cancer research institute and was in the know about Project Sunshine. Here’s Dudley spelling out the plan, semantics and all:

We have decided to make the actual collection on an unclassified basis, although the real purpose will of course remain secret. The stated purpose of the collection is for a world-wide survey of the quantity of radium in humans. We do expect to make radium analyses on at least some of the samples, so our story is merely incomplete, not false.

Ah yes, the “merely incomplete, not false” argument. Sure, the phrase probably soothed his soul but when you get down to the nitty gritty, it was a lie and a cover up. He then asked Warren to talk to another doctor about this as Dudley didn’t know how much he knew and didn’t want to mess up the opportunity for fresh samples. He wrote:

I am afraid to approach (Farber) with a story on the foreign collections. Perhaps it would be best if you would speak with him again about the foreign samples, telling a story not in conflict with the one which we are using in our contacts.

Dudley was still using his favourite phrase a couple of months later in December 1953 in a letter to Dr James Scott of the Atomic Energy Project at the University of Rochester.

After confirming the aim of Project Sunshine, he wrote:

One type of sample on which we are concentrating is the bones of infants, either stillborn or up to a year or two of age. We have found that stillborn bones are easy to obtain in the United States, and are trying to extend our collection to foreign countries. It appears that the [Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission] would be a logical contact in Japan. We could use perhaps 6 or 8 skeletons from that area.

It has been decided, for various reasons including public and international relations, to classify this project SECRET for the present. Hence, the unclassified description of our purpose in obtaining these bones is for (Radium) analyses. We actually are providing for the measurement of (Radium) as well as (Strontium-90) in many or all of the samples, so that the (Radium) story is merely incomplete, not false. The complete purpose I have described for you alone.

In 1954, an appendix to a report about Project Gabriel stated that Dr Kulp and Dr Libby had analyzed samples from 55 stillborn babies that had been collected in Chicago and analyses had also been carried out on stillborn babies from Utah and South India, and they had also tested three “human legs (adult)” from Massachusetts.

By 1955, however, ready supplies were running out. In the Biophysics Conference referenced earlier, Dr. Willard Libby stated:

[t]here are great gaps in the data.(…) By far the most important [gap] is human samples. We have been reduced to essentially zero level on the human samples. I don’t know how to get them but I do say that it is a matter of prime importance to get them and particularly in the young age group. (…) So human samples are of prime importance and if anybody knows how to do a good job of body snatching, they will really be serving their country.

This might sound like a pithy little joke, but Libby was serious and then went on to reference the legal research they’d already done in 1953.

Dr. J. Laurence Kulp then chimes in with some helpful but disturbing suggestions. He’s recorded as saying:

Down in Houston they don’t have all these rules. They claim that they can get virtually, and they intend to get virtually every death in the age range we are interested in that occurs in the City of Houston. They have a lot of poverty cases and so on…

Is it just me or is that pretty bleak? He goes on to say that he has contacts to develop “identical programs” worldwide.

Regarding the secret classification of Project Sunshine, Dr Libby stated:

At least the existence of the project I hope we will get away with revealing. Whether this is going to help in the body snatching problem, I don’t know, I think it will. It is a delicate problem in public relations, obviously. I don’t know. This is a major objective.

There was also the question of obtaining foreign samples which was addressed rather hilariously by John Bugher, who mentioned that people were more inclined to send samples if they were paid for them. He seems not to realize the obviousness of this fact and mentions:

Over the years in the Rockefeller Foundation in the yellow fever studies, we got tens of thousands of liver specimens all through Latin America by that scheme. Of course, we lost a few agents, too, who got shot or knifed, but not very many actually.

He also bemoans the entire continent of Africa for not being altruistic enough, saying:

It was a complete failure in Africa, though, for interesting reasons irrelevant to this thing. You almost always have to have somebody who sees some reward for himself in doing this work. It is too much to ask of people that they maintain a pure exalted scientific enthusiasm and are just collecting samples.

John, collecting samples, maybe incinerating them for you and then sending them all off to the United States is an absolute drag. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

Global Cover Up?

It wasn’t until 1995 that Project Sunshine was really brought back into the light, after documents from the Atomic Energy Commission were declassified under the Clinton administration. The AEC had been abolished some 20 years previously when it became apparent that having one body to both promote nuclear energy and regulate its safety was, in fact, a huge conflict of interest. Anyway, what was discovered was the shady and covert trafficking of human body parts, mainly those of young children and babies, either under the vague film of radium testing, or just no back story at all.

Again, this brings up the inherent issue with the project being classified as secret. If it was presented as a global health initiative, which it was, nobody would have had a problem with it, at least in theory, although it probably would be different if you were the person being asked to donate your child’s remains to science.

After an investigation into Project Sunshine was ordered, one conclusion noted was: “Researchers employed deception in the solicitation of bones of deceased babies from intermediaries with access to human remains.”

Over the years Sunshine was active, it collected at least 1500 cadavers from several countries including the UK and Australia, however, it seems that no-one knew much about the practice until the information trickled out after the declassifying of the AEC files.

In June 2001, the Guardian published an article by Eddie Goncalves headlined: “Britain snatched babies’ bodies for nuclear labs.”

According to the piece, the British government had always denied involvement in Project Sunshine, but the released documents made it clear that there were many links between the US researchers and UK-based hospitals and British scientists, with reports between them stamped as “top secret”. And even though this tranche of documents was released, some others were held back so we still don’t know all the details of the operation. When the Observer newspaper asked for a file called “Classified Discussions at Harwell”, the US department of Energy said: “This document has been determined to be not declassifiable and has been removed from this folder.”

From what was available, it turned out that not only were British hospitals sending the bones of deceased children to the States, they were also carrying out their own research on them, with approximately 6000 bodies being collected from across the UK and also from Hong Kong between 1955 and 1970. All of this research was carried out on the down-low, often with parents not being asked or told about what had happened. One example given is a woman called Jean Prichard whose baby died in 1957.

Prichard wanted to dress her daughter’s body for the funeral but was told she couldn’t put a Christening gown on her. She later found out that this was because the baby’s legs had been removed and taken to Harwell in Oxfordshire which is where nuclear research activities were being carried out. Prichard had not been asked or told anything regarding the body of her child.

We can only assume that this was the norm and not the exception when it came to sourcing research material.

Also in June of 2001, the Australian Ministry for Health and Aged Care got on the case and according to ABC News.com: “launched an investigation into reports of Australian baby samples being dispatched for Project Sunshine without the parents’ permission.”

The article by Leela Jacinto, titled “World Wakes up to Horrific Scientific History”, goes on to say that former British colony Hong Kong was also starting an investigation. A spokesman for the Australian Health Minister stated: “We need to verify if Australian babies were used in this manner, how many, and from where they came.”

This makes it sound as though the government didn’t have a clue what was going on, but we know that Australia was a key location for obtaining bone samples. According to a May 2003 article by Colin James titled “Nuclear dust settled across 1950s Adelaide”, over 3000 samples were taken from South Australians alone. He states:

Publicity here and overseas forced the Federal Government 18 months ago to prepare a database with the details of 21,830 Australians who had bones removed. In SA, there were 3058 individual bone samples taken from dead South Australians –predominantly stillborn babies, infants, toddlers, young children and teenagers.

The government was offering repatriation of small vials of ashes, however, this is coming some 50 years later so who knows if the correct ashes would be sent to the correct families, and that’s if the ashes were even legitimate to begin with. The declassified documents and subsequent investigations also showed that mortuary techs and pathologists in Australia were offered between 50 and 100 dollars per year to “encourage them to provide bones for testing” and that payments went on for decades.

J.R. Moroney, the secretary for the Atomic Weapons Tests Safety Committee wrote to Australian pathologists several times between 1957 and 1979, offering them small annual payments that he suggested could be put into separate accounts titled “pathological services”.

Four hospitals in Adelaide alone collected bone samples for Strontium-90 testing, even though the chairman of the Atomic Weapons Tests Safety Committee, Sir Ernest Titterton, “told successive federal governments the levels were so low the radioactive fallout could not have endangered Australians.” He also called levels of strontium-90 fallout “so trivial, they are meaningless.”

Hong Kong was also cited as a donor of cremains, and in July 2001, Thomas Yiu, Acting Secretary for Health and Welfare, replied to some questions posed by Dr Hon Lo Wing-lok. Here is a salient excerpt:

Based on the information we have access to, there has not been any mention of Hong Kong as one of the territories supplying dead bodies of babies for use in the Project Sunshine. On the other hand, according to the records obtained from the UK Public Records Office, 31 femurs of dead babies from Hong Kong were shipped to the UK in 1961 for use in a study on Strontium-90 in bones of infants in Hong Kong, jointly carried out by the UK Medical Research Council and the UK Atomic Energy Authority to ascertain levels of human contamination with radiation fallout.

The statement goes on to say:

The Department of Health, Hospital Authority and the Department of Pathology of the University of Hong Kong have all searched their records and were unable to unearth any documentation or records relating to the Project Sunshine or the ‘Strontium 90’ study. We are therefore not in a position to advise whether the consent of the families of the dead babies had been obtained prior to shipment of the femurs to the UK.

So they are confirming they did ship at least 31 femurs for UK research but have no record of it at their end. That means it’s also possible they shipped samples to the US. And as for any consent? It’s looking like it was probably a no.

A month earlier in June 2001, one of the original heads of the project, J. Laurence Kulp, confirmed that Hong Kong had been one of the sample areas. In an interview with Hong Kong’s Sunday Morning Post, Kulp is quoted as saying:

Hong Kong and Taiwan bone samples were crucial to determining what levels of exposure there had been to the population of the region to this radiation. Hong Kong had the right rainfall, the right longitude and latitude.

So maybe the bones Hong Kong sent to the UK ended up in the US after all. With the supply chain being based mainly on personal contacts rather than an official network, and with some documents still classified, there’s no real way we can confirm the number of dead bodies that were exhumed or sent to be cremated for testing without familial knowledge or consent.

A Necessary Evil?

The thing is, while it’s obviously a very sensitive subject, these tests were also the best method of seeing how bad the levels of Strontium-90 were, so wasn’t it justified and shouldn’t we just get over it and let those scientists from the 50s do their thing? Well, let’s talk about it. Yes, if the project was open and honest, maybe they would have had a dedicated, if potentially quite small, supply chain. However, the whole thing was covered up in layers of secrecy and deception, eroding public trust and ending up seeming very unsavory when we all found out about it years later.

There were also developments in general knowledge about Strontium-90 and how it’s produced by nuclear fission. If you recall, the half-life was originally thought to be about 20 years, but just three years after Project Sunshine started, it was amended to closer to 30 years. That’s not good. Information about how much strontium-90 is produced in a detonation also changed, though, and in kind of a better way, as it was calculated that actually, 2 megatons of fission would produce a millicurie of Strontium-90, not one, hooray.

J. Laurence Kulp published a report in May 1962 titled “Strontium-90 in Man” which tracked the levels of strontium-90 and variations found in the bone ash across hemispheres. Basically, the conclusion was that it now existed everywhere and areas with more reliance on dairy products such as milk in their diet showed heavier concentrations. It also hit a peak in the late 1950s and started to decline sharply in 1960 and 1961. Kulp got most of this data from fetuses.

It seemed that the alarm about the levels of harmful Strontium-90 being casually blown into the stratosphere by bomb testing overrode the morally grey areas that scientists used for their research and the findings of Project Sunshine went some way into the creation of the Partial Test Ban Treaty of October 1963 that we referenced earlier, that banned nuclear test explosions in the atmosphere, underwater or in outer space.

Project Sunshine became an un-secret project in 1956 but most of the details about the collection of samples was not known until the release of the files in 1995. Studies carried on through the 60s and into the 1970s, however the bone collecting part was largely phased out and the project was wrapped up sometime in the early 80s.

Parallel to the covert shipping of dead baby parts, however, was another study which we briefly mentioned earlier - this one was on milk teeth. As Strontium-90 attaches itself to bones and teeth, you would think that teeth would be a great thing to test but originally, Dr Willard Libby who was heading up Project Sunshine, didn’t think they would be as good indicators as bones.

Well, it seems like maybe he jumped the gun on that one.

After Project Sunshine’s first findings were published, it was found that St. Louis in Missouri was a particular hotspot for elevated levels of Strontium-90. Worried by this information, the Greater St.

Louis Citizen’s Committee for Nuclear Information was formed and they started collecting baby teeth for analysis. These were teeth that dropped naturally out of children’s heads, by the way, or that were removed by dentists. Early death was not a prerequisite for this study.

The study eventually received over 67000 teeth from a 100 mile radius around St Louis, 1335 of which were used in their first round of testing. The teeth were separated into groups based on whether the children had been breast fed or formula fed etc. and there was a clear increase in the amount of Strontium-90 found in the teeth from 1951 to 1954. By 1961, research from analysing the teeth showed that the amount of Strontium-90 found had almost tripled since nuclear testing had begun in 1945.

This information was also a key factor in JFK signing the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963.

The baby tooth survey was started off the back of the Project Sunshine bone analysis results, but it does also raise the question of whether the bone samples were that necessary when results were clearly shown in teeth which were ethically much easier to obtain. In fact, because regular citizens were knowingly and willingly contributing to the baby tooth survey, it bolstered the public interest in nuclear testing and fallout in general, leading to increased pressure to curb dangerous testing.

Eventually, the US stopped nuclear testing in September 1992 after the UK ended its nuclear testing program in 1991 and Russia in 1990, well, officially anyway.

Dr Willard Libby, who was the main force behind Project Sunshine and was advocating for body snatching initiatives went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1960 for his work on Carbon-14 dating.

The biggest issue with Project Sunshine was obviously the way it was carried out, with seeming disregard for the families of dead infants, in the name of science. This is confirmed by J. Laurence Kulp, one of Sunshine’s key names, in his interview with Hong Kong’s Sunday Morning Post in 2001. One of his choice quotes is:

What’s unethical about chemically analyzing ash? There was a huge benefit for mankind.

I mean, you can see his point, but where did that ash come from and how did you get it, Kulp? That’s the bit that people are upset about!

An article in the Taipei Times shows how he tried to further downplay the project’s actions:

He dismissed allegations the project’s scientists had been ‘baby-snatching’ saying corpses of all ages were used in the testing.

Oh, that’s fine then, carry on, Dr. Kulp.

It’s extremely clear where the media stood on this issue, especially after the declassification of the papers in 1995. The word “furore” might be appropriate here. When googling around, here are some of the headlines you can find:

• Britain snatched babies’ bodies for nuclear labs - The Guardian
• Scientist defends use of dead babies - Taipei Times
• Stillborns in atomic tests - CBS News
• Project Sunshine’s Dark Secret - The Globe and Mail
• Stillborn babies snatched for nuclear tests - CNN
• Panel Finds Coverups in US radiation tests - Chicago Tribune
• The Dark Secret behind Project Sunshine the US Government Tried to Hide - grunge.com
• Snatching Bodies for Uncle Sam - The Roanoke Times

Etc. etc.

It’s obviously a very emotive subject and while bone studies were necessary, it’s difficult to justify the scale and almost underground status of the network of medical professionals involved. The blatant covering up, deception, weaselly words, lying by omission, seeking legal options then giving up, paying for samples and exhuming who knows how many bodies without notifying families or asking permission marks Project Sunshine as a conspiracy theory that turned out to be true.

In hindsight, surely it would have been better for Project Sunshine to have lived up to its name and been brought into the light from the start.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was Project Sunshine?

Project Sunshine was a classified program commissioned by the United States Atomic Energy Commission and the US Air Force Project Rand in 1953. It aimed to measure the potential extent of nuclear fallout on the world’s population by studying the impact of radioactive fallout on humans, particularly focusing on the isotope Strontium-90.

Why was Strontium-90 a concern in Project Sunshine?

Strontium-90 was a concern because it is a highly radioactive isotope created through nuclear fission. It behaves similarly to calcium, seeking out bones and teeth, and can cause cancer in bone marrow, bones, and surrounding soft tissues.

How did Project Sunshine obtain human samples for testing?

Project Sunshine obtained human samples, particularly bones, from stillborn and dead children from across the world. This was done under a cloak of secrecy, often without the knowledge or consent of the families.

What was the significance of the Partial Test Ban Treaty?

The Partial Test Ban Treaty, signed in 1963 by the US, UK, and Soviet Union, banned nuclear test explosions in the atmosphere, underwater, or in outer space. This treaty was influenced by the findings of Project Sunshine regarding the dangers of Strontium-90 fallout.

How many nuclear tests did the United States conduct between 1945 and 1992?

The United States conducted 1054 explosive nuclear tests between 1945 and 1992, with 928 of these carried out at the Nevada test site.

What was the role of Dr. Willard Libby in Project Sunshine?

Dr. Willard Libby was a key figure in Project Sunshine, leading the study and advocating for the collection of human bone samples. He later won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1960 for his work on Carbon-14 dating.

What was the impact of the Castle Bravo test on Project Sunshine?

The Castle Bravo test in 1954, which was much more powerful than anticipated, highlighted the dangerous nature of Strontium-90. This increased the urgency for researchers to find suitable testing materials, leading to more aggressive collection methods, including the covert acquisition of human remains.

How did the public react to the revelation of Project Sunshine?

The public reaction to Project Sunshine was highly negative, with widespread outrage and media coverage highlighting the ethical violations and deception involved in the project. Terms like ‘body snatching’ were used to describe the covert acquisition of human remains.

What was the significance of the baby tooth survey in St. Louis?

The baby tooth survey in St. Louis, initiated by the Greater St. Louis Citizen’s Committee for Nuclear Information, collected over 67,000 teeth to analyze Strontium-90 levels. This study provided clear evidence of increased Strontium-90 in the environment, contributing to public pressure for the Partial Test Ban Treaty.

How did the declassification of Project Sunshine documents affect public knowledge?

The declassification of Project Sunshine documents in 1995 revealed the covert and unethical practices involved in the project, leading to investigations and public outcry. It also highlighted the involvement of multiple countries, including the UK and Australia, in supplying human samples without proper consent.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: How Did Scientists Who Stole 1500 Bodies Win a Nobel Prize?
• Hero image source by Bigul Malayi / openverse, cc0.