Soviet invasion

During his 1968 stay at the NRCC in Ottawa, following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Paldus decided to settle permanently in Canada. In December 1968, he accepted an offer of a visiting associate professorship in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Waterloo, where he has remained to the present day he obtained a regular appointment in September 1969 and tenure in July 1970. He was cross-appointed to the Department of Chemistry in June 1973. 

Within three weeks of the Soviet invasion Afghan refugees streaming across the border into hastily erected camps on the Pakistan border were telling horrific stories of how they had been gassed by the Russians. 

For simple open-shell systems, we formulated analogous doublet stability conditions [102,103], and illustrated them on a series of polyenic radicals [104]. These type of solutions do not fit into Fukutome s classification, but have now been incorporated in its generalized version [100]. The doublet stability conditions were formulated just at the time of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia [105], which greatly upset the everyday life of all citizens, not to mention the culmral and scientific activities in the entire country. For this reason. Jiff and myself gratefully welcomed the hospitality the University of Waterloo kindly provided, thanks to the efforts of Professor Sydney Davison, not knowing at the time that it would become our permanent abode. Thus, the bulk of our work on the stability problem was carried out at Waterloo. 

Another reason for looking abroad with new concern is the mounting pressure to meet the challenge of Soviet invasion of world markets. The countermeasures to be used to meet this threat should offer some positive opportunities for participation by our industry, because our Government will surely use every means at its disposal to impel U. S. business investments abroad. 

By the 1970s, both sides were militarily fatigued and sought to reach a political accommodation. A period of detente followed, in which Strategic Arms Limitation Talks took place, and the US opened diplomatic relations with the People s Republic of China. Unfortunately, detente collapsed at the end of the decade following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. 

The Soviet Union s military invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 had a significant impact on the development of computational and theoretical chemistry in Canada. The troubles in Czechoslovakia led to Jiri Cizek and Joe Paldus accepting appointments at the University of Waterloo in 1968. Their many achievements include the first ab initio study of the coupled cluster method.104... 

Meanwhile, the plants making both phosgene and mustard gas went into overdrive. In response to Churchill s constant demands, the output of gas increased markedly. Once manufactured, the gas was stored in underground mines in North Wales. The statistics available show a steady increase and indeed by the middle of 1944 Britain had stockpiled more than five million gas-carrying shells and bombs. In the event, of course, the phosgene and mustard gas were never needed. The RAF stopped the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain and in October 1940 Hitler called off Operation Sealion (the invasion of Britain) and turned his attention to Soviet Russia. 

Certainly the use of gas seemed a strong possibility in Soviet defensive actions against the German invasion of the Soviet Union. No information appears available on whether the Soviet forces considered using gas, but it is known that the German Army believed the probability that they would do so to be extremely high. 

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