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Still, with a landmass of 8.6 million sq. mi. and a population of 271 million, the Soviet Union would present logistical problems for even the most efficient police organization. The KGB manages to sustain the illusion of being all-powerful largely because Soviet citizens police one another. Schoolchildren are taught to revere Pavlik Morozov, a 13-year-old who was murdered by enraged villagers during the forced collectivization of farms in the early 1930s after he informed local Communist authorities that his father was sheltering more prosperous peasants. Few Soviets today would be likely to follow young Pavlik's example...
Cicero is a compact community, just 5.5 sq. mi. Its squat houses were mostly built between 1910 and 1940, when thousands of East European immigrants swarmed in to take factory jobs. Today Cicero's tidy yellow-brick houses are owned mainly by the thrifty children and grandchildren of thrifty Poles, Czechs Lithuanians and Yugoslavs...
Anarchy may be too mild a term for the situation in the 75-sq.-mi. triangle, where bandits, remnants of China's pre-1949 Nationalist army, and more than half a dozen "liberation armies" scramble for their share of the $800 million annual opium haul. Last February Thai armed forces ousted the region's biggest opium smuggler, Khun Sa, and his 3,000-member Shan United Army from their luxurious mountain aerie in the border town of Ban Hin Taek. Khun Sa fled back to Burma, and his departure created a power vacuum that lesser warlords...
...Sudd, Arabic for barrier, is aptly named. Its central 7,000 sq. mi. are permanently clogged with reeds and papyrus and infested with 63 species of mosquito. From May to October, the White Nile floods and temporarily extends the swamp another 4,300 sq. mi. Says Daniel Yong, a member of the area's nomadic Dinka tribe and a Jonglei Canal project official: "In the rainy season there is water everywhere, but in the dry season you can die of thirst." The Sudd proved an obstacle to 19th century explorers, but today it is more of a hindrance...
...outskirts of Denver, a storehouse of potential death sprawls across 27 sq. mi. of rolling prairie. It is the site of the U.S. Army's Rocky Mountain Arsenal, which produced weapons and chemical agents until 1969. It now harbors corroded canisters of mustard gas, lethal phosphorus wastes from incendiary bombs, unexploded rockets and mortar shells embedded in a former firing range, millions of cubic yards of soil peppered with pesticides and an abandoned five-story production plant contaminated with nerve gas. Two vast man-made lagoons, once used as dump pits for toxic chemical and biological wastes...