| ISSUE 035 · MATERIALS, CAPACITY, CONVERSION | |
| Everyone is counting artillery shells. The European Union’s ASAP programme set a target of two million rounds per year by the end of 2025; NATO members publish output numbers, and assembly lines are expanding. Tell me where the explosive fill comes from. | |
| Trinitrotoluene fills artillery shells, mortar rounds, and aerial bombs, either as the sole charge or blended with RDX as Composition B. Its raw materials are thoroughly civilian: toluene from petroleum refining, nitric acid and sulfuric acid from bulk industrial chemistry. The nitration process itself requires specialized plant, environmental permitting, and regulatory lead times measured in years. | |
| At the Cold War’s end, Europe operated seven major TNT plants, according to Swebal CEO Joakim Sjöblom in an April 2026 interview with Defense News. One remains: Nitro-Chem, in Bydgoszcz, Poland, producing 10,000 metric tons a year per its website. Russia produces an estimated 50,000 tonnes annually, per data cited by Swebal. The United States has no domestic TNT production; the Army awarded a $435 million contract to Repkon USA in November 2024 to build one in Graham, Kentucky. | |
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| PLATE · AMERICAN MACHINE TOOL FACTORY, LATE COLD WAR |
| In the 1960s the American machine tool industry led the world. The firms that built lathes, grinders, and machining centres were concentrated in the industrial Midwest. Their decline was unplanned and took two decades. |
| Between the late 1960s and the mid-1980s, the import share of US machine tool consumption rose from roughly 10 percent to 50 percent, according to a 1990 RAND Corporation study by Arthur Alexander. Between 1975 and 1985, the country went from net exporter to the world’s largest importer of machine tools, as Robert Forrant documented in a 1997 study. Firms underinvested, demand shifted, and foreign competitors filled the space year by year. |
| Capacity that takes decades to build eroded within a single generation because no crisis made it visible. Europe’s TNT production base went from seven plants to one over roughly thirty-five years of post-Cold War peace. Sweden and Finland now target first production at new plants in 2028; Britain’s project remains at the letter-of-intent stage. |
| PLATE · NITRO-CHEM CHEMICAL PLANT, BYDGOSZCZ | |||
| On 9 April 2025, Nitro-Chem signed a deal worth 1.2 billion zlotys, roughly $310 million, to supply TNT to Paramount Enterprises International for the United States armed forces, including 155mm ammunition production, Reuters reported. PGZ spokesperson Jacek Matuszak told Reuters the order could be fulfilled with existing workforce and infrastructure. | |||
| In March 2026, Poland’s deputy prime minister Krzysztof Gawkowski announced a new production line to double the plant’s output, with completion expected in three to four years, according to Reuters. Nitro-Chem signed a separate letter of intent with BAE Systems on 27 July 2026 to examine a roughly 2,000-tonne-per-year TNT facility in Britain, the Polish Defence Ministry said. | |||
| Nitro-Chem is a subsidiary of Polska Grupa Zbrojeniowa through Mesko. The plant operates on the former Zachem chemical complex in Bydgoszcz, where chemical production has run continuously since 1948. | |||
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| Every supply figure carries a date and a source in the text. Not a footnote. In the sentence. | |||
| FREE. NO STOCK PICKS. NO PREDICTIONS. | |||
| Nothing here is investment advice. No company is named as an investment. |
