> Generally speaking you don't have to worry that much about chemical weapons waste... This whole paragraph is gibberish. Some chemical warfare agents are vul

> Generally speaking you don't have to worry that much about chemical weapons waste... 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.