Inside the British weapons factory preparing for Putin

On an unassuming trading estate outside of Newcastle, 40kg artillery shells are being loaded into crates.

After being filled with explosives at a second factory in Wales, these bullet-shaped, olive green munitions will travel more than a thousand miles to the battlefields of Ukraine.

They will then travel about 30km further, when they are loaded into artillery pieces and fired at Russian soldiers.

Just shy of a metre long and 155mm wide, they can travel at 1,000 metres per second. On impact, their fragments spread in a 800-metre radius, with lethal results.

These shells, used in howitzers like the British AS90 self-propelled artillery gun, have been a lifeline in Ukraine’s bloody battle for its survival.

Artillery has played a pivotal role in the conflict, with both sides easily firing in excess of 10,000 rounds per day during the most intense periods.

But they have a weakness.

Though designed and built in the UK by the British defence company BAE Systems, some components are imported from countries with which the UK’s relationship is fragmenting.

Nitrocellulose is a chemical used in weapon propellants from small arms to advanced missiles, and is mostly sourced from China, while the explosives inside the 155mm shell come from the US and France.

As tensions rise with China, and the US pivots away from European co-operation and threatens to leave Nato, defence industry insiders fear the UK can no longer rely on their supply.

Should a significant new war break out, these products could be impossible to source, leading to a potentially critical weapons shortage.

As they race to find a home-grown solution, BAE’s top scientists say they have made a “breakthrough” in explosives manufacturing and will now be able to create their own in the UK.

They also discovered that a by-product from this new process makes a far more effective propellant, negating the need for Chinese-imported nitrocellulose.

BAE believes it will be able to supply its own propellant and explosives in the UK by 2027 – the year by which the head of the British Army warned the UK must be ready to fight or deter a war.

Defence Secretary John Healey said the defence industry “is the foundation of our ability to fight and win on the battlefield” and that “strengthening homegrown artillery production is an important step in learning the lessons from Ukraine, boosting our industrial resilience and making defence an engine for growth.”

UK closed down own munitions plant

Some of the UK’s challenge is of its own making.

In 2006, BAE and the British government closed down Bridgewater, a large explosives factory in Somerset, saying it was more cost-effective to outsource its work overseas.

Evidence submitted to the Defence Select Committee at the time warned that in closing Bridgewater, the UK would “lose all national capability for the production of military explosives”.

“Every military product used by the UK’s Armed Forces containing explosives… would have part of its production in the hands of a foreign owned provider,” it said.

Today, the firm maintains this was the right decision and that overseas supply lines have proved resilient.

But it says that the current global turbulence means that governments and defence companies need to adapt and enhance their supply chains.

British industry scales up as Putin shows his teeth

Onshoring explosives and propellants is part of a wider attempt to increase the scale and resilience of the British military in a time of war.

In the 155mm shells, complex mechanical fuses will be replaced with electronic versions that are easier and cheaper to make. A new production line in Washington has largely automated the process.

BAE is also attempting to break bigger factories down into “smaller nodes” – reducing overheads and ensuring it is less vulnerable to attack.

The entire ammunition production is due to be scaled up, with hundreds of new workers hired and shifts added so the factory can work 24/7. A new explosive-filling site in South Wales is projected to become operational this summer.

The firm believes it can increase its production of 155mm shells 16-fold by the first quarter of next year.

The decision to scale up so dramatically was stimulated by the war in Ukraine, which has shattered illusions that land war in Europe was a thing of the past.

Steve Cardew, business development director at BAE’s Maritime and Land Defence Solutions, said that “reliance on overseas supply chains is more risky”.

“Having a sovereign munitions capability is a really critical thing for national security, and therefore in order to underpin that, we’ve got to look at where our risk items are,” he said, sitting in an office above the factory floor.

“It’s quite clear that explosives and propellants are the most difficult and hard to come by materials. And therefore we needed to find a way of bringing that back to the UK.”

Cardew said Trump’s election to the White House was not part of the consideration to end reliance on American explosives – BAE has been working on that for five years.

“We’ve had a long-term plan that we want to develop this technology because we think having a sovereign capability is really important. Increased political turbulence – however, that’s now playing out – reinforces it, though it wasn’t the catalyst for it.”