Could the same mysterious ailments many Persian Gulf veterans say they're experiencing plague residents on the Wasatch Front?

Maybe not tomorrow, but years from now Utahns could find themselves suffering from fatigue, body aches, rashes, memory loss and other health problems, and their children could come into the world with birth defects, opponents of the U.S. Army's chemical weapons incinerator in Tooele County said Saturday.

A Desert Storm veteran, a former U.S. Senate staffer, a medical researcher and a Salt Lake mother were among a group of speakers who made a connection between so-called gulf war syndrome, exposure to even the lowest levels of chemical agent and the future health of the Salt Lake Valley's population. They said many Utahns could develop health problems if the incinerator, which releases minute and ostensibly harmless amounts of agent into the atmosphere, is allowed to continue burning the nation's largest stockpile of obsolete chemical weapons.

They said because the Pentagon denied for years that soldiers were exposed to nerve agents, then admitted recently that more than 20,000 were exposed in March of 1991, the official word on incinerator emissions can't be trusted.

"The Pentagon and the Army have told us we are not being exposed to dangerous levels of chemical agent, and we frankly don't believe that," said Kim Smith, co-founder of the local Families Against Incineration Risk. "What I'm worried is going to happen is 20 years from now they're going to send a team of scientists to the Wasatch Front . . . to study our high rate of cancer, birth defects and reproductive disorders."

Craig Williams, spokesman for the Kentucky-based Chemical Weapons Working Group, said the Army has postponed plans to build chemical weapons incinerators in Indiana and Maryland because it is developing more advanced methods of disposal that would not release particulates into the air. Russia and Japan recently rejected incineration as a method to dispose of their chemical weapons, he said. He suggested the Tooele incinerator be shut down until cleaner technology can replace it.

"With $30 million on a public relations campaign, you can make anything look safe," Williams said of the Army's incinerator.

Williams said the environmental groups have evidence of nine airborne releases of chemical agent from CAMDS, a test incinerator in Tooele, and three releases of live agent from the Army's prototype incinerator on Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean. Furthermore, he said, there is evidence that live agent was released into the atmosphere from the Tooele incinerator itself - once on Aug. 24, just two days after it started up, and again in September. The Army has said no airborne releases have occurred, but the incinerator has been temporarily shut down several times.

Jim Tuite, a former Senate investigator and founder of the National Gulf War Research Foundation, said there is no such thing as a safe exposure level when it comes to chemical nerve agent. He said the government "has been caught lying repeatedly" about the exposure of Americans to various tests, from nuclear explosions to radiation experiments, and the public must be diligent in demanding the truth.

Paul Sullivan, a cavalry scout during Desert Storm and a board member of the National Gulf War Resource Center, said he used the Freedom of Information Act to secure documents that showed chemicals were in fact released during the Persian Gulf conflict.

"If there is a leak of (live agent) from the Tooele Army Depot or one of the (storage) bunkers, residents of Salt Lake City may end up having gulf war illnesses coming to a neighborhood near you," Sullivan said.

The speakers also compared Persian Gulf ailments to difficulties experienced by some Dugway Proving Ground workers who may have been exposed to a variety of toxins during the Cold War testing of germ, nerve gas and radiological weapons.

Saturday's symposium, held at Westminster College and sponsored by the Chemical Weapons Working Group and Families Against Incineration Risks, was held to provide an opportunity for Persian Gulf sufferers to compare their symptoms to those of afflicted Dugway workers.

Earl Davenport, a former Dugway worker who said he was sprayed with a chemical compound, said he has had a heart attack, a bad back, numbness in his feet, sleep apnea and other health problems that he attributes to the exposure, despite the fact that he was also a heavy smoker.

The Chemical Weapons Working Group, the Sierra Club and the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation are scheduled to appear before the Utah Solid and Hazardous Waste Board in March to seek a shutdown of the incinerator on safety grounds. The groups are also asking a federal judge to close the plant.