Anduril, next-generation AI nuclear missile manufacturer, coming to Ohio to "rebuild the Arsenal" using your tax dollars
Posted: 19th January 2025
Friends, there was a dramatic business announcement on Wednesday in Columbus, Ohio: Anduril, a fast-expanding drone and missile manufacturer, specializing in AI-commanded “autonomous” weapons, will be building a huge complex, heavily subsidized by secret amounts of taxpayer largess through JobsOhio, the nonprofit state-created corporation whose accounting is proprietary, nonpublic information.
The complex will be constructed just south of Columbus in northern Pickaway County near the Rickenbacker Air Natl Guard base. Here’s a link to details about the Pickaway County ballistic missile plant.
From what I’ve been able to glean from business reportage, Anduril is moving quickly into the “hypersonic missile” business.
At their Mississippi, factory, Anduril builds “solid rocket engines.” There’s mention of them as being for “hypersonic” missiles. Some may remember Russia’s use of a hypersonic rocket two months ago against Ukraine in November, that wasn’t carrying nuclear warheads, but instead, had nonradioactive solid state warheads in the compartments on the rocket. The impact of solid objects crashing into their targets effectively created a collision equivalent to a very large TNT or even small nuclear bomb. A massively hard hitting nonnuclear weapon would have great uses for targeting in cities, for example.
Traveling at somewhere near 5,000 to 6,000 miles per hour, and flying a choice of trajectory from flat to arched like ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles are presently unstoppable. Anduril is apparently trying to counter that invulnerability.
The whole gigantic project near Columbus is shrouded in secrecy as to the products, but of course there’s hellacious hyping of the 4000 good paying jobs supposedly coming from this.
Anduril admittedly will be building small and medium-sized missiles to carry nuclear weapons for “limited” “theatre” or “battlefield” use. Anduril has been testing a shipboard missile engine for the Navy that would be capable of defending against hypersonic missiles. To counter hypersonic missiles, you have to have hypersonic missiles. They are autonomous in that they have to quickly move in the air to detect and destroy incoming 5000 mph missiles, using large explosion capability. The explosion has to be quite large in order to ensure the incoming rocket is destroyed. We’re talking about missiles flying miles per second, so an effective sizable midair detonation to destroy such a fast-moving missile probably a nuclear weapon.
It seems likely that Anduril also will be constructing offensive nuclear weapons delivery missiles. Attack missiles, in other words. An hour south of Anduril’s Pickaway County complex, at the PORTS installation near Piketon, there is a new DOE-subsidized depleted uranium (DU) purification product line. DU is an extremely hard metal and is used for the internal components of nuclear weapons, when extremely purified. DU thus could supply the material for nuclear weapons, or alternatively, the hard projectiles for non-nuclear use. DU is already used for nose cones for B61-12 nuclear gravity bombs the US has deployed to 6 military bases in Europe. The nose cones allow the bombs to penetrate 30 to 50 meters into the ground before exploding.
Also at PORTS/Piketon, there is an expanding uranium enrichment plant, with capacity to enrich uranium to weapons grade, although the present product is Uranium for next-generation power plants. It’s called High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU), enriched to slightly less than 20% U-235.
Anduril’s complex will be built near the Rickenbacker Air Natl Guard base, and there is an available modular railyard. So even if the missiles are only partially constructed in Ohio, they can easily be shipped to Los Alamos or Savannah River Site for completion, where new plutonium pits, the business end of next-generation nuclear warheads, are being manufactured.
Also, Anduril is aggressively moving to the role of providing US missiles for the military control of space. You may be interested in this disturbingly banal video of an extremely likable, brilliant Anduril engineering executive talking matter-of-factly about how we’re all on “Team USA” and the Pentagon understandably wants the capability of “watching what our adversaries do with their space assets” “and other things”—meaning, fighting wars in space or from orbit to the Earth’s surface.
So, Ohio once again will become the beating heart of the Arsenal of Democracy, heralding the new era of “small” offensive nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons expansionism is still globally illegal, but the “rules-based order” means that all that global international law babble is, well, we’re Murrica and we don’t take orders from nobody.
So shut up and think of the jobs!
Terry