Dugway Sheep Incident - Aftermath

Aftermath

The incident had an impact on the Army, and U.S. military policy within a year. The international infamy of the incident contributed to President Richard Nixon's decision to ban all open-air chemical weapon testing in 1969. The sheep incident was one of the events which helped contribute to a rise in public sentiment against the U.S. Army Chemical Corps during and after the Vietnam War. Ultimately, the Chemical Corps was almost disbanded as a result.

Following the incident, the Army and other state and federal agencies compiled reports, some of which were later characterized as "studies". A report which remained classified until 1978 and unreleased to the public until nearly 30 years after the incident was called the "first documented admission" by the Army that VX killed the sheep. In 1998, Jim Woolf, reporting for The Salt Lake Tribune, made the content of the report public for the first time. The report described the evidence that nerve agent was the cause of the sheep kill as "incontrovertible." The 1970 report, compiled by researchers at the U.S. Army's Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, stated that VX was found in both snow and grass samples recovered from the area three weeks after the sheep incident.

The report concluded that the "quantity of VX originally present was sufficient to account for the death of the sheep." Even after the report surfaced the Army maintained that it did not accept responsibility for the incident nor did they admit negligence. As late as 1997, one year before the report went public, U.S. Department of Defense officials stated that "the reason it (the report) was never published is because it wasn't particularly revealing." Lee Davidson, Correspondent for Deseret News wrote in June 1994 that Ray Peck, who owned the sheep that were killed was outside working during the May 13, 1968, incident, and members of his family developed nervous-system illnesses for years afterwards, similar to ills reported by people exposed to low levels of VX in lab experiments. Also, the probe showed that medical tests the Army had used to claim humans were not affected are now considered inconclusive, and the Pecks had shown other signs of low-level VX exposure.