I don't like puns in articles.

Danger UXB (1979) the miniseries was also very good at portraying the bomb disposal procedures.

There's also this sunk ship just off the coast of Kent that might blow up one day:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery

In many countries, that ordnance is still found and disposed of more or less regularly. The decaying involves lots of nasty chemicals. It's happening at sea as well, by the way (because they dumped their leftovers after the wars there). Here's a short info piece by the German environment ministry about the issue: https://www.bundesumweltministerium.de/en/topics/marine-cons... and here's a European map: https://ec.europa.eu/maritimeaffairs/atlas/maritime_atlas/#l...

Or WW1, which happens in Flanders/Belgium regularly. I think both. Farmers die from time to time plowing or handling old bombs. If you travel around there you may see bombs left by the front gates for a regular pickup service.

This seems like it has to vary significantly depending on a number of factors.

Unexploded ordnance refers to ordnance that was deployed but failed to explode. E.g. the bomb was dropped from a plane and just didn't explode.

Deployed mines that haven't exploded are just waiting for someone to interact with them. This seems like it must be the highest risk.

This article appears to be about a cache of unused bombs. They would not ordinarily explode on their own, but if everything is decaying then the safety mechanisms are also decaying so there must be some risk.

Well, you'll be glad to know that people like my dad (ATO/EOD) sorted quite a lot of it out back in the day. However, they could only demolish what they were pointed at and as this article notes, there is more that keeps on turning up.

This is a bit of a worry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery

I suggest you don't buy property or go swimming nearby to that. I'm going to stick in Somerset.

My assumption is that it will always be a problem.

There was a case in Virginia where a man was killed by a US civil-war era artillery round in his garage. Granted, he was in the process of making it safe at the time, but this was ~2010 from memory - so ~150 years after the conflict occurred.

Given that, we can obviously expect that some ordnance from WW2 will still be dangerous in 2095.

I think that, when undisturbed, the risk is pretty low. The real danger if someone inadvertently disturbing an old bomb with a corroding casing. Take the SS Richard Montgomery, for example. We are basically just letting nature do its thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery?wprov=sf...

Over geological timespans, everything decays. Over many decades things can remain unstable or volatile. Even if most of it becomes ineffective, some may be volatile so disturbing anything will be dangerous for many lifetimes.