Geographies of Trinitrotoluene (TNT) in Military Supply Chains

This article documents and critically conceptualises the geographies of TNT in military supply chains. Focusing on a TNT manufacturing facility in Bydgoszcz, Poland, it shows how Second World War and Cold War infrastructures are crucial to the explosive capacities of contemporary warfare. The first section sets the theoretical background of the research by reviewing existing understandings of the time-spaces of war to open a path for thinking with the case of TNT production in Poland and what it teaches us about contemporary military violence. In the second section, we recount the historical and spatial development of TNT production at the site in Bydgoszcz with an emphasis on wider geographies of militarism. The account substantiates a claim that the explosivity of many wars – of the recent past, ongoing, or in the future – is sourced, very likely, from the factory in Bydgoszcz. In the third section we examine the growing concern around TNT production in Poland as part of an ‘ecological bomb’ that threatens the environment and residents of the area and neighbouring regions. The empirical argument we build here is that TNT production in Bydgoszcz is a doubly destructive business that not only facilitates explosive violence in war zones around the world but also precipitates ecological violence in Poland. In section four we make the conceptual intervention that this specific site troubles categories of before and after war and explicates contingencies between modes of slow and fast violence. This can be productive, we suggest, in further study of military supply chains to show how they are intimately tied to the effects of wars past and the possibilities of wars coming. A short conclusion reflects on the contributions of the article to specifically practicable geographies of military violence and to future agendas of related research.