Powerful documentation
A powerful investigative story, most relevant to the current international manoeuvrings regarding Iraq, is likely to go relatively unnoticed, even though it has taken over a year to research in several countries. In its November issue National Geographic magazine carries a special report entitled "Weapons of Mass Destruction." It chose not to put the story on the cover, and the magazine reaches only a very exclusive readership in South Asia, so on both counts the investigation will get less noticed than it should. Also, National Geographic is an unlikely vehicle for damning journalism, being better known for the kind of features that also figure in this issue: on a threatened species of grass-eating monkeys in Ethiopia, another on sunfish, and a cover story on human skin.
Photographs convey far more than words can. The story is billed as a closer look at the ugly legacy of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and the pictures are poignantly chilling. They portray victims in Nevada and Utah in the US, in Japan and in Kazakhstan, who were downwind when either testing or poison gas attacks took place. Stunning pictures have been taken by photographer Lynn Johnson for an investigation which had begun well before September 11, 2001. They are not conventional victim pictures: a telling one is of Ludmila Shakhvorostova sitting at a dining table with her two sons born in the 1950s. The hefty, full grown men are obviously retarded and she is stroking one of them on the head.
She was a young woman when she watched blasts from nuclear tests the Soviets were conducting just sixty miles upwind. Now 80 per cent of the 1.5 million people in the region have weakened immune systems. Another snapshot: Yoshiyuki is leaning over his wife Sumiko, one arm around her head, his other hand clasping hers. She’s been in coma since 1995 when Aum Shinrikyo, a doomsday cult in Japan released Sarin gas some miles upwind from their city.
It is an exhaustive investigation: two pages of tables on who has what: separate weapons maps for the countries in the world--biological, chemical and nuclear. Another two page table on weapons that exist today: agent and type, symptoms, mortality, incubation, absorption, effects, treatment and so on. Author Lewis Simons and photographer Johnson travelled across Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan looking at factories and institutes set up to produce bio-weapons. They met scientists who worked in the Soviet bio-weapons programme who are now scattered across the world, able to sell their expertise for a price. They saw the ruins of former anthrax manufacturing factories. In one Russian town they photographed a lovely bunch of children studying in second grade, right next door to one of the world’s largest chemical weapons depots. In a biological institute in Kazhakstan they photographed vials of plague germs kept in an old pea can.
Journalism of this order requires extraordinary toughness and persistence. The credible part about the 34-page report is that it does not leave out the US. There are photographs of both the Nevada test site and of victims of the testing done there. There is also a picture of a young woman in foetal position. Until she became a victim of the Pentagon’s anthrax vaccine programme she was the only woman helicopter pilot in her squad.
The story tells you that the US and Russia still control most of the world’s weapons of mass destruction. Israel possesses all three categories of WMD, with Iraq and Iran not far behind. Libya, Syria and Egypt are involved in chemical and biological programmes. North Korea and China are catching up. The European nations have nuclear arms.
On the magazine’s website there are a host of ancillary features on this story at www.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0211 It also features field notes from author Simons and photographer Johnson in which they describe what it was like working to uncover this story. Johnson details her loss of innocence about the US as a country in the right. "The simplicity of loving my country unconditionally was just not an option."
(Media Focus will be written in rotation by different people)