The Cold War Program That Turned Utah into a Chemical Weapons Testing Range and Nobody Told the Sheep

On March 14, 1968, ranchers in Skull Valley, Utah discovered 6,000 sheep dead or dying across their grazing lands—victims of VX nerve agent that had drifted 27 miles from the U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Ground, where an F-4 Phantom’s spray nozzle had malfunctioned during a chemical weapons test. The Army initially denied involvement, then gradually shifted toward vague acknowledgments while never officially admitting guilt, ultimately paying ranchers $376,685 (about $3.3 million today and less than the cost of two modern cruise missiles) for the mass casualty event that exposed seventeen years of treating the Utah desert as an open-air chemical and biological weapons laboratory.

The Dugway sheep incident represents the perfect crystallization of Cold War folly: the military had conducted hundreds of tests with nerve agents, anthrax, Q fever, and other horrors just 85 miles from Salt Lake City, considering these normal operations until dead sheep made the invisible visible. The incident led President Nixon to ban open-air chemical weapons testing in 1969, yet Dugway remains operational today. As recently as 2015, they accidentally shipped live anthrax to nine states, proving that the infrastructure of insanity persists, we just promise to be more careful now.

Let’s listen in as Nathaniel Sheppard narrates this tale on my behalf, shall we?

-Daniel P. Douglas

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