US Army VX Nerve Gas Accident Killed 6,249 Sheep near Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Rancher Paid $376,685 for His Loss. [US History They Don't Teach in School]

The Dugway sheep incident of March 1968 made visible the military’s covert attempts to test and stockpile millions of dollars worth of chemical weapons...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-death-6000-sheep-spurred-american-debate-chemical-weapons-cold-war-180968717/

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.

Although the Army never released a full, detailed report, they paid $376,685 to rancher Alvin Hatch, whose sheep accounted for 90 percent of those afflicted. The military also lent bulldozers for the mass burial of the dead sheep, and initiated a review of the safety protocol at Dugway.

After World War I, in which every major power deployed chemical weapons—resulting in 1 million casualties and more than 90,000 deaths

Western nations signed the 1925 Geneva Protocol. The agreement prohibited the use of chemical and biological weapons, and for a time it seemed as if it would be obeyed.

But the United States never signed the agreement. Between 1961 and 1969 alone, the U.S. military spent $2 billion on its chemical weapons stockpile, writes science historian Simone Müller in Historical Social Research. Over that same period, the military dumped hundreds of thousands of tons of old chemical weapons directly into the ocean, without bothering to keep records of precisely where or how many weapons were disposed of. The military also discovered multiple instances of chemicals leaking out of their containers, including 21,000 leaky bomb clusters discovered in the Rocky Mountain Arsenal in Denver.

Yet the American public was almost entirely unaware of any of the stockpiles, or the danger of testing, storing and transporting them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dugway_Proving_Ground

There were at least 1,100 other chemical tests at Dugway during the time period of the Dugway sheep incident (see below). In total, almost 500,000 lb (230,000 kg) of nerve agent were dispersed during open-air tests.[15] There were also tests at Dugway involving other weapons of mass destruction, including 328 open-air tests of biological weapons, 74 dirty bomb tests, and eight furnace heatings of nuclear material under open-air conditions to simulate the dispersal of fallout in the case of meltdown of aeronautic nuclear reactors.[15]

In March 1968, 6,249 sheep died in Skull Valley, an area nearly thirty miles from Dugway's testing sites. When examined, the sheep were found to have been poisoned by an organophosphate chemical. The sickening of the sheep, known as the Dugway sheep incident, coincided with several open-air tests of the nerve agent VX at Dugway. Local attention focused on the Army, which initially denied that VX had caused the deaths, instead blaming the local use of organophosphate pesticides on crops. Necropsies conducted on the dead sheep later definitively identified the presence of VX. The Army never admitted liability, but did pay the ranchers for their losses. On the official record, the claim was for 4,372 "disabled" sheep, of which about 2,150 were either killed outright by the VX exposure or were so critically injured that they needed to be euthanized on-site by veterinarians. Another 1,877 sheep were "temporarily" injured, or showed no signs of injury but ultimately were not marketable due to their potential exposure. All of the exposed sheep that survived the initial exposure were eventually euthanized by the ranchers, since even the potential for exposure had rendered the sheep permanently unsalable for either meat or wool.

The incident, coinciding with the birth of the environmental movement and anti-Vietnam War protests, created an uproar in Utah and the international community.^[17] The incident also starkly underscored the inherent unpredictability of air-dispersal of chemical warfare agents, as well as the extreme lethality of next-generation persistent nerve agents at even extremely low concentrations.