For more than a century, the United States relied on TNT for military weapons and commercial mining. It was plentiful and cheap, selling for just 50 cents a pound a couple decades ago.
Produced by the millions of tons for both world wars and into the 1980s, TNT filled artillery shells and bombs while making it possible to blast apart rock to build roads and make cement for home foundations and major infrastructure projects.
But making TNT, or trinitrotoluene, creates hazardous waste, and by the mid-1980s the Defense Department had shut down the last facility in the United States that made it. Foreign suppliers — primarily in China, Russia, Poland and Ukraine — stepped in, offering the explosive at low prices while dealing with the hazardous waste themselves.
A second and important source of supply for commercial use had been TNT recovered from munitions like land mines, shells and bombs that the Pentagon regularly decommissions. While the weapons were deemed too old for use by American troops, the explosives inside of them were typically still fully viable and could be recycled.
But according to officials in the civilian blasting industry, those sources have dried up as the U.S. military has elected to keep older weapons in its arsenal since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
Poland had been the Pentagon’s sole authorized supplier of TNT. But it has been sending much of what it makes across its border to Ukraine, which is using all that it produces for its own military purposes.
That comes as two of the other main sources of TNT, Russia and China, have stopped exporting to the United States, the officials said.
All of this has put pressure on U.S. weapons production as well as blasting operations at the rock quarries that produce much of the raw material for bridges, roads and buildings in America.
In response, Congress authorized the construction of a new Army-run TNT plant in Kentucky that will cost $435 million. It is expected to begin operating in late 2028, but it will produce the explosive only for military use, and there are no plans to sell any of it to private industry to help alleviate the domestic shortfall.
The shortage may soon slow the progress of domestic construction projects and make certain raw materials more expensive.
“The world as we know it does not exist without industrial explosives,” Clark Mica, the president of an explosives industry trade association, said in an interview. For nearly anything that is mined, he added, “nine times out of ten explosives are involved in some way.”
And that process usually starts at a quarry.
At one such site in rural Virginia, Mr. Mica stood at the bottom of a 300-foot deep pit carved into a hillside as workers prepared to blast out more than 100,000 tons of granite in a single shot.
The commercial blasting industry has learned how to make its work less disruptive. Surveys and calculations once done by hand are now produced more quickly and precisely thanks to drones, 3-D scanners and computers that plot where and when to set off just enough explosives to do the job.
“It starts with drilling a hole and filling it with explosives,” he explained.
As Mr. Mica looked on, specialized trucks mixed ammonium nitrate with other chemicals to create a thickened blasting agent that was then pumped into the holes.
Small amounts of TNT are typically used to make that mixture explode.
Tiny electronic detonators that are timed to the millisecond set off soda-can sized booster charges of TNT placed at the top and bottom of each hole, compressing and detonating the blasting agent.
The resulting blast, which had more than twice the power of the largest bomb dropped on Afghanistan, heaved the cliff briefly into the air and dropped more than 110,000 tons of rock into the water-filled bottom of the pit.
But the noise and ground tremor from the massive explosion were negligible 500 yards away.
Soon after the dust settled, gigantic bulldozers, excavators and dump trucks began to move the shattered granite up to crushing machines just above the pit so they can be ground down for use by heavy industry.
To keep blasting operations like this going while the war in Ukraine drags on, companies are looking for alternatives to TNT.
One candidate called pentaerythritol tetranitrate, or PETN, is already made by three factories in the United States, but it is unclear how quickly production can be increased.
In recent years, the Pentagon has relied on a single factory in Poland for TNT it has needed. But it appears that the Defense Department may have secured other sources of TNT as well.
An Army spokeswoman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to speak publicly about the service’s access to explosives, indicated that the service is no longer solely reliant on the factory in Poland and noted continued efforts to enhance the domestic production of propellants and explosives in the United States.
John Ismay is a reporter covering the Pentagon for The Times. He served as an explosive ordnance disposal officer in the U.S. Navy.
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