BULLETIN FOR THE HISTORY OF CHEMISTRY
Volume 49, 2024
Kristensen, Tor Erik, “New Chemical Technology at a Time of National Emergency: Wartime Mass Production of the “Super-Explosives” RDX and HMX,” Bull. Hist. Chem., 2024, 49, 139-166.
Abstract/Description: A prodigious expansion of productive capacity for explosives and propellants must surely be a defining hallmark of a country tied up in major war—a war that was not decided through some swift military campaign, but a protracted conflict necessitating a comprehensive mobilization of a nation's collective resources. During the Second World War, the monthly rate of production of the explosive TNT in the USA in 1945 was more than 42 times the monthly rate of 1941. For smokeless powders, the rate of 1945 was 25 times the rate of 1941. Up to January 1945, some 2¼ million tons of TNT and 1¾ million tons of smokeless powders were produced. In order to make such quantities and load it into different kinds of ammunition, facilities employing 400,000 people and costing about 3 billion dollars had to be constructed-an outlay roughly 50% greater than the total cost of the Manhattan Project. The new plants covered an area larger than the combined areas of New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia and Detroit. This comprised loading and component plants, as well as works for making chemicals, high-explosives and smokeless powders. The record of achievement of the US “industry-ordnance team” was, in the account of Lt. Gen. Levin Hicks Campbell Jr. (1886-1976), the Chief of Ordnance from 1942 to 1946, “an epic of industrial accomplishment which has never been equaled in the history of the world.”
Given expenditures of this magnitude and the very tight schedules demanded by the urgency of total war, how best to organize a country's resources to undertake such massive undertakings? Even more significantly, how to go about all of this when completely novel and unproven technology is involved? Within the domain of chemical technology, a prime study example has been methodology for binding the atmosphere's nitrogen into nitric acid and nitrates for the making of explosives in Germany during the First World War, primarily by way of the Haber-Bosch and Ostwald processes. The present text will present a case with parallels. It is one that has received only sparse scholarly treatment. This is the wartime industrial production of RDX and HMX in Europe and North America, the most powerful explosives known prior to the atomic bomb. As part of the account, some of the issues raised above will be addressed in the context of this particular example. Synchronization of financial, industrial and scientific resources from entities within government, industry and academia will prove central to the narrative. Although focused on the time period of the Second World War, some remarks on the post-war period will be presented, as the importance of RDX/HMX is greater than ever, and HMX in fact gained prominence first after the war.