As I understand it, the ability to create nitrogen-rich products like gunpowder and fertilizers was an important discovery of the 20th century for both warfare and agriculture.
Today, the agricultural component is still going strong but I’m trying to figure out if the military side of this is still important. That is, specifically, I’m trying to determine if there would be any side effects of a drop in fertilizer production on the supply chain for bombs and missiles? I’d generally assume that the smaller the market, the more brittle the supply chain is going to be.
ANFO is, of course, popular with lower tech groups that want to blow stuff up, so a strong agricultural market for fertilizer is likely to be a boon for them. But, I can’t quite tell if modern day explosives and firearm propellants are still dependent on related chemistry or if that’s mostly all migrated to other technologies?
Virtually all stable secondary bulk explosives are produced by some form of nitration, which as you can imagine requires a precursor of a nitrate (or a nitrite). Nitrates can be produced from ammonia via the Ostwald process, which can be produced via the Haber-Bosch process, or directly synthesized electrochemically from nitrogen and hydrogen, albeit way too expensively to use as a fertilizer.
I’d suggest that the USA’s total munitions demand for nitrates is a proverbial tiny drop in the bucket compared to ag use. And there are probably 3 or 4 other classes of industrial use between those two poles. Even if ag use declined by WAG 90%, munitions use would simply be a slightly larger drop in a somewhat smaller bucket.
DoD is remarkably not price sensitive. SO oddly enough they will get the itrates they need even if it somehow gets silly expensive.
Thinking farther ahead, if we posit a long-lasting war like Ukraine v Russia but directly involving the US, our munitions consumption rate will be insanely large compared to current production capacity. But I’ll suggest that the supply of explosives will not be the long pole in that production tent; it’ll be microelectronics, fancy alloys, and the fancy factories to make that stuff. Not the comparatively low-tech manufacture of basic chemicals, even explosives.