I. Supply and Demand

Here, in the third decade of the 21st century, the most sought-after ammunition in the U.S. arsenal reaches the vital stage of its manufacture—the process tended by a young woman on a metal platform on the second story of an old factory in rural Iowa, leaning over a giant kettle where tan flakes of trinitrotoluene, better known as the explosive TNT, are stirred slowly into a brown slurry.

She wears a baggy blue jumpsuit, safety glasses, and a hairnet. Her job is to monitor the viscosity and temperature of the mix—an exacting task. The brown slurry must be just the right thickness before it oozes down metal tubes to the ground floor and into waiting rows of empty 155-millimeter howitzer shells, each fitted at the top with a funnel. The whole production line, of which she is a part, is labor-intensive, messy, and dangerous. At this step of the process, both the steel shells and the TNT must be […]