The Sheep Incident (2008) | Hacker News Reader

The Sheep Incident (2008)

damninteresting.com

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"The outrage over the incident was intensified just a year later when the US media was tipped off to the existence of CHASE. The Cut Holes And Sink ‘Em program was the Army’s plan for discreetly disposing of dangerous surplus materials. It involved the scuttling of ships loaded with the deadly cargo up to 250 miles offshore. Unfortunately for the US Army’s PR department, some of the materials involved were mustard gas, Sarin, and VX. Apparently a good many people had serious misgivings about dumping dangerous chemicals into the ocean. These concerns were further reinforced by the fact that the Army itself wasn’t sure whether or not the metal and concrete slabs that housed the chemicals would survive the massive pressure during their 16,000 foot descent to the ocean floor."

I read that and the first thing that popped into my head was "the banality of evil".

Right? Like imagine how many meetings they spent coming up with clever acronyms for their project to poison the ocean and then deciding on which to use.

My intuitive response is always "the illusory nature of democracy", both for past and present news articles.

same. Hard to shake that feeling once you know how the sausage is made, isn’t it?

I'd love it if you'd have a go at the question I ask in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38547433

Wtf. Are these still down there???

There's a lot down there, people have been dumping chemicals weapons in the ocean for at least a hundred years. Once it sinks you can't see it anymore so that means it's gone forever and you don't have to think about it.

https://nonproliferation.org/chemical-weapon-munitions-dumpe...

There are a lot of old munitions dumps in the ocean and they don't always "stay down there":

The WW2 bombs dumped off western Scotland washing up on beaches

    According to a letter sent by the MoD in June to researchers at the University of Liverpool, the MoD dispatched vast amounts of old weapons to Beaufort’s Dyke.

    The ministry dumped some 14,000 tons of 5-inch artillery rockets filled with poisonous phosgene gas in the trench between July and October 1945. Over the following three years, it consigned 135,000 tons of conventional munitions there, and every year “into the late 1950s” another 20,000 tons ended up in the dyke.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14820042-200-the-ww2-...

There are old munitions dumps where nobody has any idea what was actually dumped.

There’s no solution like dilution. /s

The town I went to school in was the site of a chemical weapons depot. There was a chemical weapons incinerator there dealing with the surplus which could not be stored indefinitely. Every school public building had to have enough pressurized rooms for occupancy, and we had special sirens for "there's been a nerve gas leak" and "there's been a mustard gas leak".

It was, in retrospect, a horrifying way to grow up. Anyway, the nerve agent they were disposing of was VX.

Hermiston?

Or Richmond, KY?

"It was half past midnight on March 17th, 1968. Keith Smart, the director of epidemiology and ecology at Utah’s Dugway Proving Grounds, was awakened by the ringing of a phone. On the other end was Dr. Bode, a professor at the University of Utah, and the director of the school’s contract with Dugway. There was a problem. Calls had been coming in. About 27 miles outside of the base, in the aptly-named Skull Valley, thousands of sheep had suddenly died. There were some survivors among the flocks, but it was clear that their hours were numbered. Veterinarians were dispatched to euthanize the few remaining animals.

Army officials began drafting their official denial

Reads like a Michael Crichton novel... Got Andromeda Strain vibes from this

It inspired another novel: Stephen King's The Stand.[^1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stand#Background

Summary: "In 1968, thousands of sheep died mysteriously in Skull Valley, Utah. The cause was traced back to a nerve agent test conducted by the US Army at the Dugway Proving Grounds. The test involved an airplane spraying a potent nerve agent called VX over a remote section of the Utah desert. However, due to a malfunction, the chemical continued to leak from the plane as it climbed to a higher altitude. Strong winds carried the nerve agent to Skull Valley, causing the death of the sheep. Despite evidence pointing to the nerve agent as the cause of the deaths, the Army has not officially taken responsibility for the incident."

If you liked the article, please consider a donation to Damn Interesting. They recently announced taking a break [1] because of a shortfall of donations. DI has been such a great resource for interesting articles (to me) and it would be sad to see it wither away.

[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/breaking-a-bit/

Wow, how horrifying. The more I read about the Nixon/Kissinger era, the less I wish I had.

Also of note is the fact that the original compound was used as a pesticide for years. Pesticides in general give me paranoia as they try to delicately toe the line between effectively killing small beings and not causing harm to humans.

In 1968, LBJ was president, and in 1976, Gerald Ford, so neither of these incidents can be added to Nixon's (considerable) register of sins.

Also antibiotics. Even the name is sinister.

if that freaks you out, what about cytostatics, drugs that hinder the proliferation of all cells. Just take them and pray to god it affects the fast growing tumor cells more than your own. By the way, the dose needed to actually do something to the tumor is high enough to murk you, so better take 3 different ones in lower doses

Definitely freaky, but antibiotics are just biotics too- they're just the warrior/spartan kind that have a tendency to kill off all of the other guys.

From the article: "In response to public protests over these incidents, President Nixon disbanded the Army Chemical Corp, and took action to ratify the Geneva Protocol to prohibit chemical weapons in war."

After always hearing bad things about Nixon, this came as a surprise. However, I did a little more looking and yes, Nixon did some good things for the environment.

There’s a military history channel I follow that did a special on this topic. I remember that nerve gas initially came out of the pesticide research:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P0D4Ph_yRYM

For anyone interested more about the history of nerve agents and other bioweapons, the book "Toxic" by Dan Kaszeta covers it from the beginning in German labs and globally. The author has decades of experience in protecting against chemical & biological weapons in the US Army, White House Military Office and US Secret Service. It's both very informative and a good read.

(No relation other than read it)

Maybe we’re the baddies?

The definitive book on the 1917 Bath Riots is Ringside Seat To A Revolution by David Dorado Romo.

> In the 1920s, the US Public Health Service began using small amounts of Zyklon B in the baths. The hydrocyanic acid was used as a fumigating agent at the El Paso disinfecting centers. A stronger version of the chemical was usually used to exterminate vermin, such as mice and rats. Health officials thought it would help kill lice, which carried typhus.

> Zyklon B is known to be fatal when absorbed through the skin in high concentrations. It's still unclear what lasting health impacts these baths caused on the Mexicans who had to endure them.

> In 1938, a German scientist by the name of Dr. Gerhard Peters wrote an article featuring photos of El Paso's baths and calling for the same tactics to be used in Nazi Germany's own disinfection chambers, known as Desinfektionskammern.

> Peters became the managing director of the company that supplied Zyklon B to concentration camps, and the chemical began to be used in Nazi gas chambers beginning in 1941. He was ultimately convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg, though he was retried in 1955 and was found not guilty.

> "Zyklon B was used in the baths but in very mild amounts compared to the Nazis," Levya said. "But the Nazis did learn about its use here on the border. So they were definitely studying the United States. They were looking at how laws dealt with race. They were taking a lot of cues from the United States."

https://www.businessinsider.com/bath-riots-el-paso-mexico-te...

https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/bath-riots

https://www.npr.org/2006/01/28/5176177/the-bath-riots-indign...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1917_Bath_riots

Using an insecticide as an insecticide does not make us the baddies. The insecticide was also used with a very distinct odorant additive, as is added into (normally odorless) natural gas, so that when people smell it, they can avoid it. When the Nazis ordered Zyklon B for use in teh camps, they ordered it WITHOUT the odorant; this should have tipped off the company that it was being used for murder instead of insecticide, but they either didn't know or care. That part had nothing to do with original development as an insecticide.

Also, the US has fully destroyed its entire stockpile of chemical weapons and makes no new ones.

According to the original source (and Wikipedia), Zyklon B was apparently used on people's clothes after those were removed, not on sprayed directly on people, so it's not exactly the same.

There are pictures of Mexican laborers being sprayed on the head with DDT in the 50s, however, and that for sure was not healthy (nor was the general treatment... humane to begin with). I don't think we need a very stretched comparison with the Nazis and Zyklon B to easily affirm that the US Army and the US Government did many times horrible things to plenty of people, including its own citizens (and especially the black ones, see e.g. the Tuskegee syphilis study)

“Biohazard”, Ken Alibek

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1116867/

“The 1979 Anthrax leak in Sverdlovsk”

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/plague/sverdl...

From memory: Ken devised a method of fermenting bugs in flask* and then freeze drying them to be attached to the nose cone of an ICBM. To be sprinkled over the continental United States.

[edit] * A giant vat. Certain bugs would only grow on a surface.

Wow, Utah has quite the history of bad air! First the downwinders (southern utah), then the chemical/biological weapons testing, and now the inversion (salt lake valley) and refineries existing around rapid housing development.

This was an inspiration for a plot device in the 1977 movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which helicopters spread a nerve agent which kills (or at least immobilizes) sheep and the cover is "anthrax"

In the film the cover was nerve gas leak/spill from a train, but in the brainstorming session scene someone mentioned anthrax as a possible way to clear out the population.

The helicopters were spraying some incapacitating agent to stop the folks climbing up the mountain.

Ah right, thanks for correcting my faulty memory. That's partly why the mention of VK got me thinking of that.

tldr; In 1968, the U.S. Army tested a deadly nerve agent called VX. The nerve agent killed thousands of sheep grazing near the testing site. The Army denied responsibility for the deaths. The article also details other instances of the Army mishandling dangerous chemicals.

I read this story in a slightly different light.

We did something bad, we learned from it, and we stopped.

> .. We did something bad, we learned from it, and we stopped.

You mean we moved such experiments overseas. To places such as Ukraine and Hubei Province, China.

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