How the Death of 6,000 Sheep Spurred the American Debate on Chemical Weapons

[DGUtley]

How the Death of 6,000 Sheep Spurred the American Debate on Chemical Weapons

The Dugway sheep incident of March 1968 made visible the military’s covert attempts to test and stockpile millions of dollars worth of chemical weapons.


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The morning of March 14, 1968, began just like any other day in the rural, snow-covered hills of Skull Valley, Utah. But for Tooele County Sheriff Fay Gillette, the carnage of the day would be forever seared in his mind, and for the rest of the country, it would come to be a flashpoint for a national debate about the use of chemical weapons. “I’ve never seen such a sight in my life,” Gillette later told investigative reporter Seymour Hersh about the thousands of dead livestock splayed across the landscape. “It was like a movie version of ‘death and destruction’—you know, like after the bomb goes off. Sheep laying all over. All of them down—patches of white as far as you could see.”


In the weeks and months tha followed, local veterinarians and health officials investigated the matter. Their findings: the jet that sprayed VX gas had experienced a malfunction in its delivery tanks and had accidentally released the gas at a much higher altitude than intended, allowing it to be blown far from the testing grounds. The ill-fated sheep had been grazing on grass covered in the chemical. Some died within 24 hours while others remained ill for weeks before succumbing, “generally act[ing] dazed, [with] their heads tilted down and off to the side, walk[ing] in a stilted, uncoordinated manner,” reported Philip Boffey for the journal Science. It was exactly the suite of symptoms scientists would expect to accompany poisoning by VX nerve gas. But the most damning report came from the National
Communicable Disease Center in Atlanta, which tested the water and forage food from the area, as well as the blood and livers of dead sheep. Their tests “prove beyond doubt that these responses are in fact identical and can only be attributed to the same chemical” as the Army provided for comparison, stated the report.

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[Peter1469]

I got to go to an undisclosed location for advanced NBC training when I was an enlisted soldier. We were in a level IV sealed room and all of the US chemical weapons released so we could test for them and see that our protective gear actually worked.

[DGUtley]

I got to go to an undisclosed location for advanced NBC training when I was an enlisted soldier. We were in a level IV sealed room and all of the US chemical weapons released so we could test for them and see that our protective gear actually worked.

I watch a pelosi-ton of WW1 and WW2 shows. I watch the chemical attacks from WW1 and the flimsy protection they had then. Wow.

[MisterVeritis]

I watch a pelosi-ton of WW1 and WW2 shows. I watch the chemical attacks from WW1 and the flimsy protection they had then. Wow.

However, our flimsy, cloth masks we use daily will protect us from molecules several orders of magnitude smaller than the complex molecules found in chemical weapons.