Disir
Platinum Member
- Sep 30, 2011
- 28,003
- 9,605
- 910
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.”
Had all those sheep eaten a poisonous plant? Had they come into contact with foliage sprayed with pesticides? Or maybe there was an even more alarming culprit: the Dugway Proving Ground, the Army’s largest base for chemical and biological weapons testing, located only 80 miles from Salt Lake City and a mere 27 miles from the stricken animals.
As more sheep sickened and died, spokespeople for the Dugway facility denied testing any weapons in the days before the die-off. But on March 21, U.S. Senator Frank Moss, a Democrat representing Utah, released a Pentagon document that proved otherwise: On March 13, the day before Sherriff Gilette came across the macabre scene, a high-speed jet had sprayed 320 gallons of nerve gas VX across the Dugway grounds in a weapons test. The odorless, tasteless chemical is so deadly that less than 10 milligrams is enough to kill a human by asphyxiation, via paralysis of the respiratory muscles.
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.
Read more: How the Death of 6,000 Sheep Spurred the American Debate on Chemical Weapons | History | Smithsonian
Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! Give the gift of Smithsonian
Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter
I had no idea it all came down to sheep killing.
“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.”
Had all those sheep eaten a poisonous plant? Had they come into contact with foliage sprayed with pesticides? Or maybe there was an even more alarming culprit: the Dugway Proving Ground, the Army’s largest base for chemical and biological weapons testing, located only 80 miles from Salt Lake City and a mere 27 miles from the stricken animals.
As more sheep sickened and died, spokespeople for the Dugway facility denied testing any weapons in the days before the die-off. But on March 21, U.S. Senator Frank Moss, a Democrat representing Utah, released a Pentagon document that proved otherwise: On March 13, the day before Sherriff Gilette came across the macabre scene, a high-speed jet had sprayed 320 gallons of nerve gas VX across the Dugway grounds in a weapons test. The odorless, tasteless chemical is so deadly that less than 10 milligrams is enough to kill a human by asphyxiation, via paralysis of the respiratory muscles.
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.
Read more: How the Death of 6,000 Sheep Spurred the American Debate on Chemical Weapons | History | Smithsonian
Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! Give the gift of Smithsonian
Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter
I had no idea it all came down to sheep killing.