Fallout on Livestock
Downwind of the Nevada Test Site the epidemics of leukemia and cancer among residents would come later.
Animals, however, were immediately affected. The AEC quietly paid a few hundred dollars to owners of some
horses that suffered beta radiation burns in 1953.100 But the concern about livestock burns was soon overshadowed
as sheep began dropping dead—in unprecedented numbers and with unprecedented rapidity.
One hundred fifty miles from the test site, on Wheeler Mountain land owned by George Swallow in Nevada,
about seventeen hundred sheep grazed on tender grass. It was lambing time in spring 1953. On the third Tuesday
morning in May, George Swallow, his brother Dick, and a ranch hand named Lee Whitlock watched a pink fallout
cloud (from the Harry detonation) drift overhead, toward the Utah line, Air Force jets following behind. Within a
few weeks five hundred of the females in the flock of seventeen hundred sheep were dead. Sixty-five percent of new
lambs were stillborn.101
The Swallows owned eleven sheep herds of the same size; the herd that sustained the high ratio of deaths and
dead births was the one on Wheeler Mountain when the Harry blast fallout passed through.102 George Swallow
expressed his suspicions to the AEC. "We told Mr. Swallow that our experts have assured us that this sort of thing
can’t happen," AEC acting field manager Joe Sanders informed national headquarters.103
But the AEC’s own files were filled with classified descriptions of similar incidents throughout Nevada, Utah, and
Arizona. One Utah sheepherder reported twenty-five hundred stillbirths. Cattle and horses developed lesions and
severe sores in large numbers.104
Dr. Stephen Brower was Iron County agricultural agent in southwestern Utah at the time. The Atomic Energy
Commission stressed to Dr. Brower that the federal government had no intention of being held accountable for herd
losses. Word first came from the chief of the AEC’s Biology Branch of the Division of Biological Medicine, Dr.
Paul B. Pearson.
Brower recalled that Pearson "told me . . . that the AEC could under no circumstances afford to have a claim
established against them and have that precedent set. And he further indicated that the sheepmen could not expect
under any circumstances to be reimbursed for that reason."105
In Cedar City, Utah, a U.S. Public Health Service veterinarian, Dr. Arthur Wolff, studied area sheep in June 1953.
"My main concern was whether there was radioactivity involved," he recalled. "We autopsied a couple of animals,
and I took some specimens back with me and took some [radiation] measurements. I was able to determine, yes,
there was a relatively high level of radiation in the Iodine-131 in the thyroid and some radiation on the wool of these
sheep.106
Cedar City sheepherder Kern Bulloch described what happened with his herd in 1953 this way:
We were over at Coyote Pass right next to the bomb site just herding our sheep. One morning we were
sitting in the saddle there, and some airplanes come up and one of them dropped a bomb. Jesus, it was
bright! I put my hands up like that and you could doggone near see your bones. And then that cloud come
right over top of us, it mushroomed right over our camp and our herd. And we were sitting there—’course
we didn’t know a thing about radiation or bombs or anything else. Pretty soon here comes some jeeps with
Army personnel, and they said to us, "My golly, you fellas are in a hot spot." We didn’t even know what
they were talking about.
Then we started driving the sheep back to Cedar [City], and we just started losing them. We got them in
the yard there to get their lambs out, and gosh, every time you’d go in there, there’d be 20 or 30 dead sheep.
The lambs were born with little legs, kind of potbellied. Some of them didn’t have any wool, kind of a skin
instead of wool. We figure we lost between 1,200 and 1,500 head close to half our herd.
Later, the scientists come, we took them up to a pile of bones and I remember putting a Geiger counter
down. Somebody said, "Are they hot?" And one of the scientists said, "Hot? I’ll say! This needle just
about hit the post."107
Kern Bulloch remembered, nearly three decades later, "we just started to losing so many lambs that my father—
[who] was alive at that time—just about went crazy. He had never seen anything like it before. Neither had I;
neither had anybody else."108
Twenty-seven years passed before some semblance of the full story reached beyond the memories of downwind
herders and officials privy to classified government files. In 1980 the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee
on Oversight and Investigations provided the sort of overview kept from a national spotlight for decades.
The committee reported that, at the time of the two heaviest fallout tests in Nevada during the spring of 1953,
there were 11,710 sheep grazing in a zone from 40 miles north to 160 miles east of the test site. "Of these sheep,
1,420 lambing ewes (12.1 percent) and 2,970 new lambs (25.4 percent) died during the spring and summer of
1953."109
This sheep mortality rate was considerably above normal.110 But the government denied that there was anything
amiss—refusing to admit radiation was involved. "It seemed like a policy decision had been made, and federal
officials were there to implement it," Dr. Brower told us. "The government just wanted to cover up."111
Although the AEC profusely insisted in its public statements throughout the 1950s and beyond that fallout had
nothing to do with sheep ills, a different assessment later came from Dr. Harold Knapp, a scientist who served with
the AEC Fallout Studies Branch in the early 1960s. "The simplest explanation of the primary cause of death in the
lambing ewes is irradiation of the ewe’s gastrointestinal tract by beta particles from all the fission products that were
ingested by the sheep along with open range forage," Dr. Knapp concluded. Radiation doses to the sheep internal
tracts "are calculated to be in the range of thousands of rads, even though the external gamma dose to the sheep was
within the 3.9 r limit per test series established by the Atomic Energy Commission as acceptable for persons living in
areas adjacent to the test site."112
The 1980 House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee report disclosed that its researchers had uncovered
"substantial documentation from the files of the Government veterinarians and scientists assigned the task of
investigating the 1953 sheep deaths, which revealed the Government’s concerted effort to disregard and to discount
all evidence of a causal relationship between exposure of the sheep to radioactive fallout and their deaths."113
Recently declassified minutes of a secret June 10, 1953, AEC meeting verify that the commissioners were aware
that "sheep grazing in an area approximately 50 miles from the site were determined to have beta burns in their
nostrils and on their backs and 500-1,000 out of a total of approximately 10,000 were reported to have died while
being moved to grazing lands in Utah."114
But the AEC commissioners proved more concerned with publicity than health problems of either sheep or
humans.115 At a July 7 meeting Commissioner Henry Smyth observed that public concern could be allayed by
comparing bomb fallout "to radiation incurred in the normal medical use of X-rays."116 It was a public-relations
angle that proved to be a favorite for the AEC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and utilities operating nuclear
power plants across the nation in future decades.
But the analogy—comparing X rays with radioactivity from nuclear fission—is highly misleading. An atomic
bomb, or a nuclear reactor, produces radioactive alpha and beta particles that can be deadly if inhaled or swallowed
even in minute quantities; the alpha and beta "internal emitters" are not present in the penetrating X rays used for
medical purposes. The comparison with X rays also falsely assumes that bomb fallout or emissions from nuclear
plants are evenly distributed in the population. A number of factors—including weather conditions and radioactive
contamination of the ecological food chain117—can subject some animals or people to higher amounts of
radioactivity.
Twenty-six years later the report by congressional investigators quoted from the AEC’s conclusive press
statement about the sheep, issued on January 6, 1954:
On the basis of information now available, it is evident that radioactivity from atomic tests was not
responsible for deaths and illness among sheep in areas adjacent to the Nevada Proving Grounds last Spring,
the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission reported today.
The AEC findings, reached as the result of extensive research studies, was concurred in by the U.S.
Public Health Service and the Bureau of Animal Industry, U.S. Department of Agriculture. Prior to
issuance by the AEC, the report was reviewed by the Department of Health, State of Utah. Special studies
were conducted by veterinary and medical research scientists at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and
Hanford Works and the University of Tennessee to determine whether radioactivity contributed to the
deaths.118
But some of the AEC’s own experts disagreed. Veterinarian Dr. Richard Thompsett, for example, reported that
lesions on downwind sheep typified effects of beta radiation—and that the atomic tests had been a factor in the mass
deaths of sheep.119 Dr. Thompsett’s report was never published. Dr. Stephen Brower recounted that Thompsett’s
"report was picked up—even his own personal copy—and he was told to rewrite it and eliminate any reference to
speculation about radiation damage or effects."120
Follow-up research by scientists at the Los Alamos lab—C. Lushbaugh, J. F. Spaulding, and D. B. Hale—
concluded that among sheep downwind from the Nevada Test Site "the skin lesion was remarkably similar,
histologically, to severe beta ray burns as demonstrated experimentally." The researchers added, "It would appear
from these gross observations that this and similar lesions seen in the field . . . confirm well enough to a presumptive
diagnosis of a radiation-produced lesion."121 Publicly the AEC stuck to its story—a story that would be repeated
time and again to farmers and ranchers downwind from nuclear facilities.
In his role as county agricultural agent in southwest Utah, Dr. Brower accompanied sheep rancher Doug Clark to
talk with federal administrators. "Doug raised some questions with the team of scientists, one of whom was a
colonel," Dr. Brower remembered many years later. The colonel "seemed to be the leading spokesman to kind of
press this issue that it couldn’t have been radiation. Doug asked him some fairly technical questions about the effects
of radiation on internal organs that he’d gotten from other veterinarians."122
In response the colonel called Doug Clark a "dumb sheepman" and told him he was "stupid—he couldn’t
understand the answer if it was given to him, and for just 10 or 15 minutes, just kind of berated him rather than
answer the question."123
A week after the Atomic Energy Commission’s unequivocal public denial that sheep had been harmed by atomic
test fallout, AEC officials faced angry livestock owners in a conference room of the Cedar City firehouse. The
January 13, 1954, meeting included a dozen or so federal officials and a roughly equal number of area livestock
owners.
"We know that practically all the sheep that range in that area had these effects," said a local rancher. "We fed
these sheep corn and tried to keep them up. I couldn’t keep my sheep up where they were able to raise a lamb. I had
never seen it before.124
"We would like to have an answer for you," responded AEC biological medicine chief Dr. Paul Pearson. "We
don’t have any explanation for it. There have been instances of disease coming in that caused different effects, we
don’t know what happened."125
"There is very little protein in corn and they could be low in protein," interjected Leo K. Bustad, a General
Electric Company envoy from the AEC-controlled Hanford Nuclear Reservation, prime production center for
weapons-grade plutonium. "How was their flesh?"126
Refusing to be drawn into a discussion about his sheep’s flesh with the GE representative, the rancher said that his
sheep got all the protein they needed from grazing. "Range is white sage and black sage. . . . Sage is very high in
protein."127
And so it went. "The body dose radiation that these sheep got is around five roentgens," explained GE’s Bustad
midway through the meeting. "You can get more roentgens from a fluoroscope or an X-ray machine than these sheep
got through body radiation." Bustad failed to note that the sheep ingested radioactive particles into their bodies,
which does not occur during an X ray. Nor did he mention that five roentgens is a hazardous dose in either case.128
A year later the Bulloch family filed suit in federal court, suing the U.S. Government for the loss of fifteen
hundred sheep because of fallout. When the case came to trial in 1956, the federal government presented testimony
that the sheep died of natural causes.129 During initial investigations the Bullochs had heard researchers attribute the
sheep deaths to radiation. "A lot of those scientists that checked the sheep and admitted it, when they got to court
they had a different story," commented McRae Bulloch.130
The Bulloch family lost their court suit. Twenty-five years later no downwind rancher had been able to collect a
penny from the federal government for a single dead sheep.131
100. Deseret News, February 15, 1979.
101. Chicago Tribune, April 1-5, 1979, "Radiation," p. 10.
102. Ibid.
103. Ibid.
104. Ibid.
105. Forgotten Guinea Pigs, p. vii.
106. Deseret News, February 20, 1979.
107. Life, June 1980, p. 36.
108. Forgotten Guinea Pigs, p. vii.
109. Ibid., p. 3.
110. Dr. Stephen Brower, interview, March 1981. When we spoke with him, Dr. Brower was a professor at Brigham Young University.
111. Ibid.
112. Dr. Harold Knapp, "Sheep Deaths in Utah and Nevada Following the 1953 Nuclear Tests," quoted in Forgotten Guinea Pigs, p. 4.
113. Forgotten Guinea Pigs, p. 4.
114. AEC Commissioners Meeting Minutes, June 10, 1953.
115. On October 26, 1953, the AEC convened a secret meeting at Los Alamos to take up the question of sheep deaths. The scientific method was not of
paramount concern as the AEC’s chief of the Weapons Radiation Effects Branch presided. Dr. George Dunning stressed to the assembled scientists the need
for getting together a self-exonerating report for AEC commissioner Eugene Zuckert. As recorded by federal veterinarian Dr. Arthur Wolff, the influential
Dr. Dunning informed the meeting’s participants that a firm statement—concluding there was no connection between the nuclear tests and the sheep woes—
would be necessary "before Commissioner Zuckert [would] open the ‘purse strings’ for future continental weapons tests." Scientists present tacitly agreed to
go along with such a declaration, despite the opinions of some that a judgment would be premature, with the understanding it would be tagged "for internal
use only" within the AEC. See Forgotten Guinea Pigs, p. 7.
116. AEC Commissioners Meeting Minutes, July 7, 1953.
117. See Washington Post, November 11, 1979, for Dick Brukenfeld’s article "A New German Study Challenges the NRC Assurances," on food chain
concentrations of radiation.
118. "AEC Report on Sheep Losses Adjacent to the Nevada Proving Grounds," January 6, 1954; quoted in Forgotten Guinea Pigs, p. 4.
119. Forgotten Guinea Pigs, p. 6.; Deseret News, February 15, 1979.
120. Forgotten Guinea Pigs, p. 6.
121. Deseret News, February 15, 1979.
122. Forgotten Guinea Pigs, p. viii.
123. Ibid. It was, as Dr. Brower put it, "a tough kind of experience for Doug. I remember he left there to go out to his ranch to meet with the loan company to
account for what sheep he had left, and within a couple of hours, he was dead from a heart attack. I think that . . . part of the stress that he experienced at that
time was that abuse that he had received from these officials."
124. Minutes of livestock owners’ meeting with AEC officials, Firehouse, Conference Room, Cedar City, Utah, January 13, 1954.
125. Ibid.
126. Ibid.
127. Ibid.
128. Ibid.
129. Deseret News, February 20, 1979.
130. Life, June 1980, p. 36.
131. Bruce Findley of Salt Lake City (current attorney for downwind sheep ranchers), interview, March 1981; Deseret News, February 20, 1979.