By George Kaminsky

Nitradyn has won a $581 million Pentagon contract to design, build and commission a plant in Graham, Kentucky, that will produce the explosive formulation IMX-104, The Defense Post reported. The facility is due to be finished before the end of 2030.

IMX-104 is an insensitive munition explosive that blends RDX, NTO and DNAN. Nitradyn says the plant will make those three ingredients itself, along with HMX, and should turn out about 8 million pounds of IMX-104 a year, with capacity left over for other formulations. The company was founded in 2025 as a joint venture of Dyno Nobel and Paligen Chemical.

The location matters as much as the plant. The Army is building a TNT facility at the same Graham site, which The Defense Post describes as set to become the first domestic TNT source since the 1980s. Nitradyn’s president, Braden Lusk, said putting both projects together gives the Department of War an explosives manufacturing campus able to produce a range of formulations.

A March report from bne IntelliNews argued that the limiting factor for US munitions is often the energetic material inside the weapon rather than the missile or shell around it. The report said a plant in Tennessee operated by BAE Systems is currently the only US producer of compounds such as RDX and HMX, running two production lines today compared with ten during World War II. It also cited an Army review from 2023 that found more than 100 single points of failure in supply networks tied to explosives and related materials.

The Kentucky campus will not ease that squeeze quickly. With completion set for the end of the decade, the contract is a long-term bet on a second source of the core ingredients in modern munitions.

Sources: The Defense Post; Manufacturing.net; bne IntelliNews.