In March of 1953 a 24-kiloton tower detonation codenamed Nancy dropped radioactive fallout over thousands of sheep grazing on the winter range just northeast of the Nevada Test Site (NTS). By the time the herds returned home to Cedar City, Utah, several weeks later, there were problems afoot.
Many had blisters and scabbing around the mouth in tandem with lesions extending up the muzzle, along the head, and down the back underneath the wool which pulled off in chunks during shearing. Passing a Geiger counter along their throats evoked a frenzied clicking, indicative of the absorption of radioiodine in the thyroid gland. At lambing time, the ewes were lethargic and died in a strikingly abrupt manner, and many lambs were stillborn, stunted, and/or perished soon after birth.
The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) assembled a team to investigate. They considered three scenarios: 1) Radioactivity was a direct cause; 2) Radioactivity represented a contributing factor exacerbating poor range conditions and the stresses of trailing and pregnancy; 3) Radioactivity played no role in the deaths of about 4,400 sheep. After seven months of inquiry, AEC officials settled on the least plausible explanation: fallout played no role in the grisly and anomalous event. The problem was most likely malnutrition.
With decades of experience raising sheep in the hardscrabble ranges of southern Nevada and Utah the ranchers were skeptical of the Commission’s explanation. Nonetheless, they confronted an institutional definition of the situation buttressed by the expertise of an organization charged with atomic development while ensuring public safety; a dual mandate the AEC could never balance.
Leo K. Bustad and colleagues at Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State began radioiodine experiments on sheep in 1950 and were asked to compare ongoing research to the die-off in southern Utah. The Bustad Report, dated November 30, 1953, concluded, “The Utah sheep showed no evidence of the radiation damage observed in the experimentally treated sheep.” This was the cornerstone of the AEC’s final report, published in January of 1954, proclaiming radioactivity did not contribute to or cause the sheep deaths.
However, the Bustad report omitted of a crucial empirical observation: ewes ingesting radioiodine, a by-product of the fission process, gave birth to stillborn, stunted, and weak lambs that soon perished. The Cedar City ranchers would have recognized this grim scenario–approximately 3,000 of their lambs were stillborn or died soon after birth. In turn, Bustad and colleagues had data explaining why this likely occurred, but it was not explicitly mentioned in the text. One could only find this information in an obscure citation in the endnote references of the Bustad report: “Toxicity of I131 in Sheep. V. General (Low-level chronic effects).”
One would scarcely deduce it from the title but in time this came to be known as the “fetal lamb report.” Within this report lie an experimental outcome that may well have threatened the continued use of the AEC’s outdoor laboratory in Nevada: Bustad et al. killed a lot of lambs by feeding their mother’s radioiodine.
Failure to highlight research illustrating the dire effect of radioiodine on gestating lambs constituted scientific fraud. Further, the major conclusions of the Bustad report focused on the effects of radioiodine on otherwise healthy adult sheep. A majority of deaths were newborn lambs, and many other deaths occurred among ewes facing the rigors of trailing long distances while pregnant. In turn, Bustad et al. compared apples to oranges even as they failed to disclose the data directly relevant to the issue at hand.
Dr. Bustad went on to become a distinguished professor at Washington State University (WSU), where he was Dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine from 1973-1984, and a speaker at high schools, community colleges, and universities around the world. So revered is Dr. Bustad the Veterinary Science Building at WSU is named in his honor. He wrote books detailing the human-animal bond and published a collection of speeches addressing subjects as varied as compassion, the responsibilities of a scholar, and empathy towards the nonhuman world. In 1976 he delivered a speech addressing the problems plaguing the country. He counseled:
“I believe history teaches us that the foundation of a republic’s power is not restricted to its armies, but rests on the integrity of its institutions and its people.”
Working under contract with the AEC, Leo Bustad is also at the center of a controversy amid open-air atomic testing in Nevada. This matters as the sheep grazing in the shadow of the NTS were the canary among the sagebrush. Radioactivity downwind of Nevada would later be associated with childhood leukemia and, potentially, other diseases that include thyroid cancer as a consequence of radioiodine ingestion.
Science can illuminate observable patterns and thereby contribute to society, and science can be employed to obscure those patterns threatening the interests of powerful actors in society. The integrity of scientific conduct is as important as accurate measurement, replicability, and hypothesis testing.
The Bustad report gave AEC and military officials a reason to conclude sheep downwind of the NTS did not exhibit radiation injury, despite illustrating all of the clinical symptoms. But the reverberations did not end there.
Unconvinced that malnutrition killed their sheep, the ranchers filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court in Salt Lake City. Bulloch et al. v. United States went to trial in 1956, and, again, the AEC confronted a dire threat to continental atomic testing. Government lawyers had the fetal lamb report but did not present it at trial. The plaintiff’s counsel, a country lawyer with limited resources, did not yet know about the fetal lamb report. And, again, the Bustad report had an undue influence on the proceedings.
On October 2, 1956, Judge A. Sherman Christensen announced his decision: the evidence did not support the conclusion radioactivity was the cause or substantively contributed to the injuries exhibited by the sheep. Christensen noted witnesses for the government included the most well-regarded experts in the country. However, the judge conceded he was troubled by the lack of evidence pointing to an alternative explanation: “I am not satisfied on the exact cause of these excessive losses. That part has bothered me a good deal.”
The AEC assured the public they possessed the knowledge and expertise to conduct testing in a manner that was not detrimental to human health or livestock production, and a court of law upheld the Commission’s insistence an unprecedented die-off was in no manner linked to fallout. It was a coincidence. It was not cause and effect. There were no lessons to be drawn between the animals and the people, the lambs, and the children.
To initiate a chain-reaction it is necessary to possess a critical mass of fissionable material. In a similar manner, for an entrenched definition of the situation to be disrupted there must be a critical social mass sufficient to sustain a chain reaction of altered opinions and assumptions. “We can define this social critical mass as the smallest number of people who are cognizant of a particular problem and who, under the right social and cultural circumstances, can facilitate the continual exchange of information about that problem,” Sarah Fox notes.
Like the successive collision of neutrons and protons at the heart of an atomic device–the dominant interpretive framework must be disrupted in a cascading manner. The ruling against the plaintiff in Bulloch, however, short-circuited the critical social mass sufficient to fragment the Commission’s preferred narrative. And open-air atomic testing in Nevada continued until 1962. Dead sheep could have provoked a reassessment within the AEC of assumptions regarding the efficacy of internal emitters of radiation. If the sheep were a canary amongst the sagebrush, what did their demise portend for the downwinders, particularly the children?
For more information:
Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), “Report on Sheep Losses Adjacent to the Nevada Proving Grounds,” January 6, 1954.
L.K. Bustad, S. Marks, N.L. Dockum, D.R. Kallwarf, and H.A. Kornberg, “A Comparative Study of Hanford and Utah Range Sheep,” Hanford Atomic Products Operation, 30 Nov. 1953. (Bustad Report)
R. Jeffrey Smith, “Scientists Implicated in Atom Test Deception,” Science 218, no. 4572 (1982): 545-547, quote at 545.
Leo K. Bustad, Compassion: Our Last Great Hope, 2nd Edition (Delta Society, 1996).
A. Sherman Christensen, 1956, Bulloch v. United States, 145 F. Supp. 824 (U.S. District Court, Utah).
Sarah Alisabeth Fox, Downwind: A People’s History of the Nuclear West (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 2014).