| ISSUE 015 · MATERIALS, CAPACITY, CONVERSION | |
| The European Union’s ammunition programme aimed for capacity to make two million artillery shells a year by the end of 2025, Defense News reported on 14 April 2026. The US Army’s goal, set in 2024, was 100,000 rounds a month by October 2025. Both are counts of rounds assembled. | |
| The main charge in a 155mm shell is TNT, by the Army’s own description. It is made by nitrating toluene with nitric and sulfuric acids, and it also goes into bombs, grenades and mines. Civilian blasters cast it into boosters for mines and construction; in November 2025 the Institute of Makers of Explosives told CNBC that American users faced a TNT shortage. | |
| Radford Army Ammunition Plant in Virginia stopped making TNT in July 1986, a West Point Modern War Institute paper recorded on 18 August 2026. The Pentagon’s contract notice of 8 November 2024 for a new plant at Graham, Kentucky, gave an estimated completion date of 3 November 2028. In April 2026 the chief executive of Swebal told Defense News that Europe’s seven major TNT plants at the end of the Cold War are now one. | |
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| PLATE · TURRET DRILL ON THE AUCTION FLOOR, GARDENA, CALIFORNIA, 1986 |
| The American machine tool industry of the 1970s and 1980s went one builder at a time, and each closure was reported as a company story. Burgmaster, founded in Los Angeles after the Second World War by Fred Burg and his family, built turret drills and at its peak was the largest machine tool builder west of the Mississippi, according to Max Holland’s 1989 history of the firm. |
| Houdaille Industries bought it in 1965 and was itself taken private in a debt-financed buyout in 1979. In 1982 Houdaille petitioned Washington for relief against Japanese builders, among them Yamazaki, which had once licensed Burgmaster technology. President Reagan declined to act in 1983, and the contents of the Gardena plant went to public auction on 15 January 1986. |
| Radford stopped making TNT six months later, a closure reporting has tied to tightening environmental rules. Each loss was taken one plant at a time; rebuilding runs on a longer clock. Before the Graham award, Army acquisition chief Doug Bush told Defense News the plan was to build within 48 months of a contract. |
| PLATE · TNT PLANT, NITRO-CHEM, BYDGOSZCZ, POLAND | |||
| Nitro-Chem, in Bydgoszcz in northern Poland, makes about 10,000 tonnes of TNT a year, Reuters reported on 16 March 2026, citing the company. It belongs to the state armaments group PGZ through its subsidiary Mesko. That week it signed with Prozap, a design unit of the fertiliser group Grupa Azoty, for a second line expected to double output within three to four years. | |||
| On 9 April 2025 it signed a 1.2 billion zloty contract with Paramount Enterprises International, a US defence logistics firm, for 18,000 tonnes of TNT for American forces over 2027 to 2029. A PGZ spokesman told Reuters the order needed no new lines and no new hires. | |||
| The two earlier contracts with the same buyer were signed on 7 November 2023 and 14 April 2024. The company dates its first TNT production to 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. |
