Don't worry, citizen, it's not leaking much yet, go on holiday at the coast.
https://www.gremberghe.nl/2013/07/het-mosterdgas-voor-onze-k...
(At least the idea was discussed years ago - whether it is implemented in current land mines, I've no idea.)
While mines are still an abomination, ensuring they are laid down with an expiry date is still progress. Of sorts. I am in the rather awkward position of hoping for development in the anti-personnel mine business - I've no illusions such an effective weapon will ever be obsolete, so the best we can hope for (sigh) is that they will at least not cause collateral casualties for decades after the conflict which caused them to be deployed in the first place.
Sometimes a cow blows up or worse. The sad thing is that they get more, not less, dangerous over time. The reason is that they drift inside the terrain over the decades and they can get even in areas that were thought to be clear.
In fact putting a landmine is my pet example for something that is easy to do and terribly difficult to undo.
Shame on those working in them, as this is solving the wrong problem. The Ottawa Treaty is signed by most the worlds countries, with the usual suspects have avoided doing so.
Your attitude is pragmatic, and likely the best that could be achieved.
TOBY Whoa... What happened to the nuance of diplomacy?
TABITHA Oh, sorry, the shoes are shined.
TOBY No we-we're there now, you-you can't go back.
TABITHA Sorry.
TOBY Right.
TABITHA 142 countries have signed it, 84 have ratified, 12 destroyed there entire stock.
TOBY Yes.
TABITHA You know who hasn't signed it? Us and Cuba.
TOBY You know who initiated it? Us. And the nations of the world rallied around it in yet another impressive display of American leadership.
TABITHA And then?
TOBY We bolted.
TABITHA Right.
TOBY And the reason we did is because we love anti-personnel land mines. We love 'em. And we think the government should be in the business of selling them, like the Post Office. In fact, the Post Office is the sales venue we've been considering.
TABITHA Toby. I-I got a...
TOBY It's Korea. Tabitha. There are 900,000 North Korean soldiers in the DMZ, and the only thing stopping them from walking into South Korea are 37,000 US troops, and about a million land mines along the border. We have said over and over that we would be thrilled to sign this treaty if we could have an exemption for South Korea and we have been rebuffed. Rebuffed... I say.
From The West Wing, Season 3 – Episode 16 – “The U.S. Poet Laureate”.
Heavy metals and exotic engineered chemicals that are only mildly toxic and/or are mostly nonreactive that can pass through the food chain or will not affect you immediately but build up is what you should worry about (agent orange, mercury, etc).
In the closing months of WWII, the German sub U-864 was sunk just off the island of Fedje in south-western Norway; among its cargo was 67 tons of mercury and scientific personnel - it was on its way to Japan to aid in the war effort.
The quicksilver is still there, slowly seeping out of the wreckage; good thing (as such things go...) quicksilver is heavy and insoluble in water. With any luck it seeps into the seabed before any marine life ingests it to find it is not insoluble in fat and tissue.
This whole paragraph is gibberish. Some chemical warfare agents are vulnerable to hydrolysis, but only if the munition casing is compromised. However mustards are quite robust against environmental degradation; they have low volatility, they're hydrophobic, and they resist hydrolysis. Thus they appear to persist indefinitely even when the bare chemical is exposed to water. Read the news stories about fishermen being burned by blobs of mustard that were accidentally trawled from the sea floor, or people on beaches injured by random enounters with wandering bits of mustard.
And of course none of this matters as long as munitions are still intact, which will be the case for millions of hundred-year-old shells dumped at sea and buried on land for the foreseeable future.
> Heavy metals and exotic engineered chemicals...
Mercury is indeed a persistent pollutant that bioaccumulates. When you mention agent orange, I'm guessing you're talking about the dioxins that are supposed to have contaminated some batches of pesticides. However none of these are exotic engineered chemicals, and they certainly aren't "mildly toxic". While many old weapons dumps present a mercury hazard, they're dwarfed by the mercury pollution caused by coal-fired power plants. Dioxins aren't really relevant to weapon dumps; the vast majority of dioxin pollution (and chlorophenols in general) comes from burning of waste and industrial accidents.