SALT LAKE CITY -- The Atomic Energy Commission ordered scientists to suppress evidence that nuclear fallout killed thousands of Utah sheep in the 1950s, a former agriculture extension agent told a federal judge Monday.
Dr. Stephen L. Brower testified in the first day of the trial of a second lawsuit brought by more than a dozen southern Utah sheepmen who claim radioactive fallout from atom bomb tests killed 4,400 sheep in the spring of 1953.
The ranchers also claim the Atomic Energy Commission and the U.S. Justice Department lied about the incident in another trial 26 years ago which the stockmen lost.
Brower, a Brigham Young University professor who was extension agent in Cedar City, Utah, during the 1950s, testified he participated in tests on animals which mysteriously died following two atom bomb tests that spread fallout over parts of southern Utah. He said AEC scientists told him they believed the sheep died from exposure to fallout.
But Brower said the same scientists later told him they were asked to change their stories. He said Dr. Paul Pearson, head of the biological medicine division of the AEC at the time, offered research money to study the sheep deaths.
'But he told me the stockmen should not expect compensation for their losses,' Bower said. 'He said the government could not afford to have that precedent set in court because claims would mushroom all over the country for both animals and humans.'
The sheepmen brought a similar suit in 1956. But U.S. District Judge Sherman Christensen dismissed the action, ruling the stockmen could not prove fallout killed the animals. The government claimed the deaths were due to malnutrition caused by drought conditions on the range.
But Christensen allowed the stockmen to reopen the suit after documents and testimony surfaced during a 1979 congressional hearing in Salt Lake City indicating the AEC withheld and suppressed evidence during the earlier trial. Christensen is presiding at the new trial.
The ranchers want compensation for 3,000 lambs and 1,400 ewes which died in March 1953 shortly after a pair of open-air atomic blasts at the Nevada Test Site that were part of a test series called 'Upshot-Knothole.' Some ranchers were forced out of business by the losses.
In opening arguments for the ranchers, lawyer Dan S. Bushnell said the AEC and Justice Department 'perpetrated a fraud on the court' during the first trial. He said the commission and the department suppressed evidence and presented false testimony to back up a claim that the sheep died from malnutrition.
Bushnell said he would present evidence showing government reports on the sheep death were altered and that evidence on the effects of radiation on sheep were deliberately withheld by government lawyers.
He said the dead range sheep had the same symptons as test animals that were exposed to radiation, 'but scientists kept quiet about those experiments.'
Bushnell also represented the ranchers in the first trial.
Bower testified about an incident in which an Army veterinarian berated a stockman who asked about radiation tests on sheep.
'The colonel attacked him verbally about him being a dumb sheepman and not being smart enough to understand it if he did give him the data,' Bower said.
The stockman, Douglas Clark, who also was chairman of the Iron County Commission, died less than two hours later of a heart attack, Bower said.
