Soviet military bases

Soil pollution is mostly concerned with heavy metals originating from heavy industrial complexes. However, there is a special problem in Hungary which is characterized by 1000s tonnes of gasoline and kerosine in the soil on large territories of abandoned former Soviet military bases these are often near groundwater sources for local inhabitants. 

On leaving their military bases in Czechoslovakia, the military of the old Soviet Union dumped all chemicals out onto the ground in an unbelievable show of disrespect. At one location, 50,000 kg of solvent was dumped out of a storage tank onto saturated soil. The solvent formed a pool on the surface that was visible for more than 2 weeks. As part of a hazard assessment, the Czech engineers need to know the total mass of benzene (one compound composing the solvent) that was evaporated into the air versus time for the 2-week period. Estimate and plot this mass. The mean depth of the pool just after the spill was 10 cm. Incorporate the diffusion of benzene into the saturated soil. Assume that there is no turbulence in the spilled pool. 

In a departure from his usual and highly popular westerns, author Louis L Amour wrote a novel in 1987, Best of the Breed (Bantam Press), in which a military pilot of native American ancestry is shot down over the former Soviet Union and is forced to use the survival skills of his ancestral culture to escape his enemies. On the rare occasions when he is able to trap and kill an animal for food, he selectively eats the fat, not the meat. Based on your reading of this chapter, what is his reasoning for doing so ... 

During the Cold War era, both the United States and the Soviet Union had deployed a large quantity of chemical weapons in their overseas bases. See Robert E. Harkavy, Bases Abroad The Global Foreign Military Presence (Oxford Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 282-284. 

This chapter traces and offers some explanations for the transition, in practice, from a rapprochement relationship in which China was characterized as a former enemy - a fellow realist power with whom the United States cultivated a mutual distrust of the Soviet Union, and toward whom the United States tilted covertly while pursuing a superpower detente -to a relationship that encompassed more intimate diplomatic and military ties with a China represented as a tacit ally. The latter contained a much more overt anti-Soviet focus, within which Kissinger emphasized offering strategic reassurance to the Chinese and the development of conceptual and domestic opinion bases for a closer security relationship, while bargaining for more favorable terms of diplomatic normalization. 

Based on this evidence, senior defense department personnel concluded that the Soviet Union possesses a decisive military advantage because of its chemical capabilities. 167(p3)... 

Although it was clear that an adequate technical base had yet to be built, the Soviet doctrinal marriage of chemical weapons in warfare had already been developed by 1920. In January of that year, instruction in CW defense was formalized in the curriculum of the Higher Military-Chemical School of the RedArmy.il... 

After the remarkable properties of the purple membrane were discovered by W. Stoeckenius and D. Oesterhelt in the early 1970s, Soviet scientists were the first to investigate its potential for computing. By using bioelectronics, they hoped to compensate for the headstart which Western scientists had in semiconductor technology. Although part of the research carried out as the Project Rhodopsin in the Soviet Union is still kept as a military secret, it is known that the Soviets developed a bR-based microfiche film called Biochrome. 

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