Paul Graham

In four days of the Iran war, the US and its allies fired more Tomahawks than the US builds in four years. One bottleneck is energetics production. So we built a 100% CONUS energetics supply chain with our own capital. Our modular solution makes HMX and other advanced energetics, the explosives in nearly every US missile and munition. The US builds about 85 Tomahawks a year. The Army's only plant making the explosives inside them is 84 years old, and its $1B upgrade has slipped from 2025 to 2029 or later. That plant is Holston, in Tennessee. It makes about 3% of what it made in 1944, and buyers wait one to two years for its explosives. Holston makes its chemicals and its explosives on one site, so every expansion means building both plants there. A plant like that takes billions of dollars and about a decade to build. Permitting this in the US is a nightmare, because you’re taking on the risk of a chemical plant and an explosives plant at once. What could possibly go wrong. We separated the two. Terraforge 1, Solugen’s Houston plant, is tied into Houston's petrochemical infrastructure and makes inert precursors: white powders about as flammable as sugar. They can ship via FedEx or UPS, and sit in an ordinary warehouse. Discreet. Odin Energetics, our joint venture with Kraken Kinetics, turns them into explosives in shipping container reactors called Nitroforges. It took us six months to build the first one, and they can be set up where the weapons are needed. On-demand energetics. That means no stockpiles or concentrated first-strike targets. Kraken builds the warheads, so every step from chemical to warhead happens in the US. Together we stood up the entire chain from raw chemical to finished warhead. Odin can already make close to a tenth of what Holston makes in a year. To make more, we’re building several factories at the same time. wsj.com/politics/national-se…