ON THE MORNING of March 14, shepherds from the Hatch Ranch in Skull Valley noticed that many of the roughly 2,800 ewes grazing near White Rock, on the slope of the Cedar Mountains, had begun to act “crazy in the head.” The sheep had a profuse nasal discharge and appeared dazed, responding with a delay to noise or rapid movement. They made frequent attempts to urinate and walked in a stilted, uncoordinated manner, often falling when they attempted to leap. Some held their head tilted down and to the side at an odd angle, indicating a weakness in the muscles of the neck. The most seriously affected animals staggered and dropped to the ground in apparent exhaustion, unable to rise. By afternoon, hundreds of sheep at White Rock had begun to die. A few hours later, another flock grazing on the plain below the Stansbury Mountains on the east side of Skull Valley began to develop identical symptoms.
On the evening of March 14, the foreman of Skull Valley Ranch called two local veterinarians, Dr. Marr Fawcett and Dr. Richard Winward, who arrived the next morning. They examined the sick ewes but were unable to diagnose the cause. Particularly baffling was the fact that sheep were the only animals in the area that showed signs of illness; horses and cattle grazing among them were unaffected. Because sheep are susceptible to several viral and bacterial infections, the ranchers feared that an outbreak of infectious disease might be spreading down the valley.
By March 15, sheep were dying in five separate flocks in Skull Valley, and the local ranchers were seriously concerned. Three days later, two experts from the U.S. Department of Agriculture—Dr. Lynn James, a veterinarian, and Dr. Kent Van Kampen, a veterinary pathologist—performed field autopsies on sixteen dead sheep and found no lesions suggestive of infectious disease or the ingestion of poisonous plants. Van Kampen urged Alvin Hatch, the manager of the Anschutz Land and Livestock Company, to contact Dugway Proving Ground and find out if there had been a recent test with a dangerous chemical or biological agent. Hatch reported the sheep deaths to a Dugway official, who denied that any activities at the proving ground could have been responsible.
On March 19, Utah Governor Calvin Rampton appointed Dr. D. A. Osguthorpe, a veterinarian and consultant to the state department of agriculture, as his special representative to investigate the Skull Valley outbreak. That afternoon, Osguthorpe flew in his private plane to the White Rock area, accompanied by state Livestock Commissioner David R. Waldron. Suspecting that the animals may have been poisoned, the veterinarian drew blood from ten sick ewes that could still walk. Laboratory analysis showed that the animals’ cholinesterase levels were depressed, suggesting exposure to an organophosphate compound, possibly a pesticide.
Over the next few days, experts from the Agricultural Research Service and the Animal Health Division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Utah State Department of Health, the University of Utah, and Dugway Proving Ground examined the stricken sheep and took tissue samples. One by one, they ruled out toxic plants, heavy metals, parasites, and viruses as the cause of the mysterious illness and narrowed the search to a toxic chemical. Although organophosphate pesticides were used routinely in Skull Valley to treat sheep for skin parasites and to spray alfalfa fields, it was still too early in the season to apply them.
On March 20, one week after the VX test at Dugway, sheep on the western slopes of the Onaqui Mountains began to manifest symptoms similar to the flocks in Skull Valley. All of the sick animals were located within an area extending east-northeast from the proving ground and shaped roughly like an isosceles triangle with an apex at the test grid, sides fifty miles long, and a base twenty-five miles wide. Within this triangle, the highest levels of illness and death were in the flocks closest to the proving ground. Although Dugway officials continued to insist that “no tests which could be harmful to animals” had been conducted recently, Dr. Osguthorpe remained suspicious. He returned to White Rock and injected several sick sheep with atropine, using the recommended therapeutic dose. Seeing no response, he repeated the treatment at increasingly higher levels. When he administered several times the normal therapeutic dose of atropine, some of the stricken animals were able to walk, although their recovery was only temporary.
By now, Dr. Osguthorpe was convinced that the sick sheep were suffering from organophosphate poisoning. He and Livestock Commissioner Waldron paid a visit to Dugway Proving Ground and met with Colonel Watts, the commanding officer, and Dr. Mortimer A. Rothenberg, the scientific director. After Osguthorpe had laid out his concerns, the Dugway officials assured him that the Army had not tested any toxic organophosphate compounds since July of the previous year.
The next day, the veterinarian accompanied Utah’s Governor Rampton on a helicopter tour of the five affected flocks. All of the available evidence still pointed to chemical poisoning. Blood samples from sheep owned by the Deseret Livestock Company and pastured north of the White Rock area had significantly depressed levels of blood cholinesterase. Subnormal levels of the enzyme were also found to a lesser extent in cattle, horses, wild rabbits, rodents, and birds in the affected area.
Although Dugway officials continued to deny responsibility, their position was undercut on March 21, when the Army Testing Command in Washington, D.C., provided a technical report to the office of Utah Senator Frank E. Moss. According to this report, on March 13, the day before the first sheep in Skull Valley had fallen ill, Dugway had conducted three separate operations involving nerve agents: the release of Sarin from a 155 mm artillery shell, the destruction by burning of 160 gallons of persistent nerve agent, and the spraying of VX from a jet aircraft. Although the first two activities were quickly ruled out as possible causes of the sheep illness, the third remained under suspicion.
The Army Testing Command had given the report to Senator Moss in confidence, apparently intending it “for official use only.” Because the document bore no restrictive markings, however, Senator Moss’s press secretary, Dale Zabriskie, freely distributed copies to Utah-based reporters on March 21. After receiving a flurry of press calls, the Army staff in Washington declared that the information released by Moss’s office was wrong.
On March 22, a frustrated Governor Rampton called a meeting at his office in the Utah State Capitol in an attempt to resolve the controversy. Attending were Dr. Osguthorpe; Colonel Watts and Dr. Rothenberg of Dugway Proving Ground; Brigadier General John G. Appel, the commander of the Deseret Chemical Center; and Brigadier General William W. Stone, the head of the Army Matériel Command, who had been sent from Washington to investigate the incident. Speaking on behalf of the Army, General Appel admitted that the information released by Senator Moss’s office was correct and that Dugway had conducted tests with nerve agents on March 13. Governor Rampton replied that if Dugway was responsible for the sheep deaths, it should compensate the affected ranchers. But General Appel disputed the existence of a cause-and-effect relationship between the VX trial and the sheep deaths in Skull Valley.
A cloud of VX released during an open-air trial at Dugway Proving Ground in March 1968 killed thousands of sheep, which were buried in trenches in Skull Valley, Utah.
After the meeting, Colonel Watts arranged for Dr. Osguthorpe to be granted an interim security clearance so that he could be briefed on the secret release of VX at Dugway on March 13. On learning of the live-agent test, the veterinarian was incensed at the Army’s stonewalling. Had Dugway acknowledged the accident early on, the sick sheep could have been treated with antidotes, greatly reducing the number of dead and injured. The Army’s belated admission also raised concerns about the health of the people who lived and worked in Skull Valley. If the VX-tainted rain and snow had been toxic enough to injure or kill thousands of sheep, it might have affected humans as well. To assess the possible public-health impact, officials from the U.S. Communicable Disease Center (CDC) in Atlanta and the Utah State Department of Health assembled a team of experts in medicine, veterinary medicine, and epidemiology. They arrived in Skull Valley on March 23 and surveyed 110 individuals but found no illnesses or complaints that might be linke
d to the sheep deaths. Blood samples drawn from forty-three people showed cholinesterase levels within normal limits.
On March 26, the Army made backhoes and operators available so that the ranchers could bury the sheep carcasses in long trenches. Although Dugway officials continued to deny that the VX test had been responsible for the die-off, feeding experiments provided strong evidence of persistent toxic contamination in Skull Valley. On April 1, more than two weeks after the nerve agent trial, researchers from the USDA’s Poisonous Plant Research Laboratory collected forage plants from the White Rock area. When the plants were dried, ground, and fed to healthy sheep through a stomach tube, the animals developed low blood cholinesterase levels and clinical symptoms characteristic of “Skull Valley disease.” In another experiment, healthy sheep were transferred to graze in Skull Valley. After four to six days, these animals developed neurological abnormalities similar to those of the sick sheep, indicating that the forage was still tainted. A group of “control” animals, which were moved to the affected area but kept muzzled and fed only hay and water brought in from outside, showed no signs of illness.
On April 4, after a long delay, the Army reluctantly provided a small sample of VX, the composition of which remained secret, to the CDC in Atlanta for comparison studies. Eight days later, the center sent a telegram to the Utah State Department of Health reporting that its scientists had isolated a compound “identical” to VX from snow and grass in the White Rock area and from the liver, blood, and stomach contents of sheep that had died there. For the CDC, this evidence proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the Dugway test had been the cause of the sheep deaths. Forage collected in Skull Valley in June 1968, three months after the incident, no longer caused illness when fed to healthy sheep, indicating that the toxic agent had finally broken down.
One mystery remained to be solved: Why were sheep the only animals in Skull Valley to be seriously affected by low-level VX contamination? The explanation turned out to be that other mammalian species, such as cattle, horses, and humans, have a second form of cholinesterase (called butyrl-cholinesterase) that circulates in their blood serum. This reservoir of the enzyme absorbs and sequesters some of the nerve agent that enters the body, limiting its harmful effects on the cholinesterase in the nervous system. Sheep, in contrast, have almost no butyrl-cholinesterase in their blood. Without this natural buffering mechanism, they are exquisitely sensitive to nerve agents and can be injured or killed by less than a milligram of VX, far below the lethal dose in other animals or humans. The sheep grazing in Skull Valley had also been exposed to higher levels of VX than the other animals because they had consumed large amounts of tainted vegetation and snow.
The sheep die-off had now been explained to the satisfaction of everyone but the Army, which continued to call the findings “inconclusive.” Although Dugway refused to accept responsibility for the sheep deaths, the Army agreed to compensate the ranchers for their losses under the Military Claims Act. The total number of sheep affected by the incident was determined to be 6,249, of which 4,372 were dead and 1,877 presumed exposed and hence not marketable. (About half of the dead animals had been shot by ranchers.)
On July 5, 1968, in response to the Skull Valley incident, Secretary of the Army Stanley R. Resor established an Interagency Ad Hoc Advisory Committee for Review of Testing Safety at Dugway Proving Ground, chaired by U.S. Surgeon General William H. Stewart. In November 1968, this committee issued its final report. Without officially acknowledging the accidental release of VX, the Stewart committee suggested a number of measures to minimize the risks to public health from open-air testing. Among the report’s twelve recommendations were that high-speed fighter aircraft maintain “positive control” over the release of lethal agents; that no releases be made at heights of more than 300 feet or wind speeds greater than fifteen miles per hour; that trials be designed so that the toxic cloud would not cross Highway 40 until three hours after a release; and that open-air tests be forbidden if thunderstorms were present within a hundred miles. Secretary Resor accepted all of the committee’s recommendations and also required Dugway to improve its air-sampling and atmospheric-modeling capabilities so that it could predict the downwind behavior of toxic clouds over a distance of several tens of miles.
In early 1969, nearly a year after the Skull Valley incident, the U.S. Army Claims Service paid the affected ranchers a total of $376,685. This sum was based on an average price per sheep of about $55.00, considerably above the purchase price of $30.00. The reason for the high price was that the dead and injured animals had all been ewes that were either pregnant or likely to lamb in the next few months; they had also been heavily laden with wool, which would have provided additional income. Despite the generous compensation, the Army continued to deny responsibility for the incident, creating an enduring legacy of distrust toward Dugway officials on the part of local residents.
THE SKULL VALLEY incident focused a great deal of negative publicity on the U.S. chemical warfare program. Not only was the massive sheep kill voted Utah’s number one news story of 1968, but it became the subject of two network television documentaries, including the main segment of the popular NBC newsmagazine First Tuesday. Broadcast at 9:00 p.m. on February 4, 1969, the segment documented aspects of the British, Canadian, and U.S. chemical weapons programs and showed images of the dead sheep in Skull Valley. Among the millions of Americans who watched the First Tuesday broadcast was Representative Richard D. McCarthy, a Democratic congressman from Buffalo, New York, who was surprised and outraged by what he saw. During the Skull Valley segment, his wife, Gail, turned to him and asked, “You’re a congressman. What do you know about this?” “Nothing,” he replied, his indignation rising when he realized that, without his knowledge, he had voted to appropriate large sums of money for nerve agent production and testing.
The Pentagon kept the sensitive issue of chemical weapons hidden from most members of Congress by classifying the relevant information and releasing it on a strictly “need to know” basis. Only five members of the House Appropriations Committee, and no more than 5 percent of the entire House of Representatives, were cleared for information on chemical and biological weapons. As a result, a small clique of senior congressmen was able to allocate money for these programs in secret session and then bury the line items in massive appropriations bills that were brought to the floor for a vote with little advance notice, so that few members had time to read them.
To shed more light on the issue, Representative McCarthy requested a briefing for House members on U.S. chemical and biological warfare policy. When Army officials said that the briefing would be secret and conducted behind closed doors, the Buffalo congressman insisted that the first part be held in open session. The Army reluctantly agreed, and the two-part briefing took place on March 4, 1969. Brigadier General James A. Hebbeler, the briefing officer, denied that Dugway had been responsible for the sheep kill in Utah, warned that the Soviet Union had a chemical warfare capability “seven to eight times” that of the United States, and requested more funding from Congress. For Representative McCarthy, the Army’s presentation raised more questions than it answered.
Whereas McCarthy soon became a leading critic of the Chemical Corps, its top booster was Representative Robert Sikes of Florida. Not only was he a major general in the Army Chemical Reserve and the chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, but his congressional district included Eglin Air Force Base, the home of the Air Force chemical weapons development laboratory and testing station. Representative Sikes continually stressed the Soviet chemical threat and the need for a credible U.S. deterrent.
IN MAY 1969, McCarthy and Representative Henry S. Reuss of Wisconsin, who chaired a subcommittee of the House Government Operations Committee, held two days of hearings on the environmental and health hazards associated with open-air testing of lethal chemical agents. On July 11, at the prodding of Reuss’s subcommittee, Army Secretary Resor disclosed that in addition to the hundreds of tri
als at Dugway, the Chemical Corps was releasing live nerve agents during training exercises at the Army Chemical School at Fort McClellan, Alabama, and at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. Although the testing in Alabama was relatively minor, the program in Maryland was extensive: over a three-month period, the Army planned to conduct 239 weapons tests at Edgewood, compared to 358 at Dugway. After this information was released, more than a hundred people demonstrated outside the gates of Edgewood Arsenal. Within weeks, the Pentagon gave in to public pressure and announced a moratorium on the open-air testing of lethal chemical agents.
Also during the summer of 1969, the Army faced a crisis over the presence of U.S. chemical weapons on Okinawa, an island off the coast of Japan that had been under effective American control since the end of World War II. Roughly 45,000 U.S. troops were stationed at various military installations on Okinawa, including storage depots, training areas, barracks, communications centers, ammunition bunkers, and fuel tanks. In addition, Kadena Air Base in the center of the island, with its two 12,000-foot runways, was one of the largest and busiest U.S. Air Force bases in Asia.
In 1961 and 1963, the Kennedy administration had secretly authorized the deployment of mustard and nerve agent weapons to Okinawa without informing either local or Japanese officials. At a depot run by the 267th Chemical Company, hidden in a pine forest a few miles from Kadena Air Base, hundreds of sod-covered concrete igloos were surrounded by three electrified fences and guarded by a sentry-dog platoon. Inside the bunkers were wooden pallets holding stacks of bombs and artillery shells filled with Sarin or VX. The munitions were painted gray and marked with three rings to signify that they contained nerve agents. Rabbits and goats wandered freely among the igloos, serving as living “sentinels” to provide early warning of a nerve agent leak.
War of Nerves Page 25
