A Highland Name and a Cold War Shadow

Strontium's name is a quiet piece of Scottish geography embedded in the periodic table, honouring the mining village whose ore first yielded it. The element gained a darker modern significance in the twentieth century, when the radioactive isotope strontium-90, produced in nuclear fission and spread by atmospheric bomb tests, was found to lodge in bones and teeth in place of calcium, becoming one of the most feared fallout products of the atomic age and a focus of the campaign to end open-air testing.

Strontium thus joins a Highland place-name to a Cold War anxiety, with its cheerful red firework flame standing between the two. Public alarm over strontium-90 was sharpened by the Baby Tooth Survey, a study begun in St. Louis in 1958 that collected tens of thousands of children's shed baby teeth to measure the fallout isotope accumulating in their bodies; the rising strontium-90 levels the survey documented helped build the public and scientific pressure that led to the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, which moved American, Soviet and British nuclear testing underground. Strontianite, the mineral that started the whole story, remains a modest curiosity today, quarried in only a few places worldwide compared with the far larger celestite deposits that now supply most strontium.