The World's Explosives Makers: TNT, RDX and the Western Shortage

The Chemistry of the Chokepoint

Military explosives fall into a few families. TNT (trinitrotoluene) is the workhorse bursting charge — relatively stable, cheap to handle, and the standard fill for artillery shells. RDX and HMX are higher-energy, higher-density explosives, often blended with TNT in compositions such as Composition B to increase destructive effect. Nitrocellulose, the basis of propellant, is a separate but related energetic material covered on the propellant shortage page.

What unites them is industrial fragility. All require hazardous nitration chemistry, strict environmental controls and specialised facilities. Because peacetime demand was low, Western governments allowed this base of the supply chain to shrink to a handful of plants — in some cases a single site for an entire class of explosive. That concentration is precisely what turned explosives into one of the war's defining bottlenecks.

When artillery consumption in Ukraine exploded, the limit on Western resupply was rarely the shell body. It was whether enough TNT, RDX and propellant existed to fill and fire it.

The North American TNT Gap

The starkest example was TNT. For years, North America produced no domestic TNT and relied entirely on imports for the primary bursting charge of its artillery shells. A combination of low peacetime demand, the cost and danger of energetic-chemical plants, and tighter environmental regulation had pushed production offshore — an efficient choice in peace, a strategic vulnerability in war.

The Ukraine war exposed this as a single point of failure. With allied stockpiles draining and the US Army targeting roughly 100,000 complete 155mm rounds a month — implying tens of thousands of tons of explosives a year — dependence on imported TNT became untenable. Restoring domestic capacity moved to the top of the procurement agenda.

The response came through new contracts. The US Army awarded roughly $435 million to Repkon USA to build a TNT plant in Graham, Kentucky, intended to bring TNT manufacturing back onto American soil for the first time in decades.

Holston: RDX and HMX

While TNT had vanished domestically, the higher-energy explosives RDX and HMX remained concentrated at one site: the Holston Army Ammunition Plant in Kingsport, Tennessee. Government-owned but operated by BAE Systems' Ordnance Systems division under a long-term contract, Holston has been the principal US source of RDX/HMX-based formulations for decades.

That single-site concentration carries the classic chokepoint risk: an incident, modernization shutdown or capacity ceiling at Holston ripples through the entire US munitions program, since RDX and HMX feed not just artillery but bombs and missile warheads. BAE has run a multi-year modernization program to update the plant for current and new explosives.

The wider point is structural. A defense base that relies on a single plant for an entire class of explosive has no redundancy, which is exactly the fragility that planners are now trying to engineer out of the system.

Europe's Makers

Europe's explosives and propellant base is similarly narrow. France's Eurenco is a central player, producing nitrocellulose, propellants and explosives. It restarted nitrocellulose output at its Bergerac site after a 2022 accident forced a shutdown, and committed roughly €500 million to expand, targeting around 1,200 tonnes of explosive powder a year and a tenfold increase in powder production.

Propellant and nitrocellulose also flow from Nitrochemie, the joint venture between Rheinmetall and RUAG with sites in Wimmis, Switzerland, and in Germany. Both the Swiss government and Rheinmetall backed expansions; Rheinmetall separately bought the German nitrocellulose maker Hagedorn-NC to secure feedstock, with its CEO describing the deal as overcoming a strategic bottleneck. In Norway, Chemring Nobel expanded explosives capacity with EU support.

Across these names, the story is consistent: a thin pre-war base, urgent post-2022 investment, and a multi-year build-out — because energetic chemistry cannot be scaled overnight.

The New Plants

The wave of new capacity spans both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, Repkon USA's TNT plant in Kentucky aims to restore domestic TNT, while General Dynamics committed roughly $200 million of its own capital to restart 155mm shell production at a Texas plant beset by delays, restructuring its arrangement with the Turkish firm Repkon in the process. The Mesquite, Texas site added large-scale projectile and metal-parts capacity.

In Europe, the EU's ASAP program directed about €500 million toward explosives, powder, shells and missiles, funding expansions including Chemring Nobel in Norway and supporting Eurenco and Nitrochemie growth. The common thread is redundancy: enough plants and capacity that no single facility is the chokepoint.

The constraint is time. Energetic-chemical plants require design, environmental permitting, safety certification and qualification of the resulting explosive, so even well-funded projects typically take several years to reach full output. The shortage is being addressed, but it will ease gradually through the late 2020s rather than overnight.

Who Makes What

⚠ Figures are approximate and from reporting by Bloomberg, Reuters, Defense News and company/agency statements. Contract values and timelines change; verify the as-of date.