INSIDE THE BOMB FACTORY
We take a tour of a world-leading munitions factory to find out how bombs and bullets are made
WORDS MIKE JENNINGS
DID YOU KNOW?
Modern smoke bombs use pellets to release smoke over a 5,000-metre range
It’s not every day that you get invited to visit a bomb factory, but that’s exactly what happened to How it Works, so we jumped in the car and headed to Washington, in the north of England, to visit a plant operated by BAE Systems
. Drive up to the building and you’d be hard-pressed to guess what gets made there. There’s a security gatehouse, but beyond that it just looks like any other factory. On the inside, though, it’s a very different story. Most of the armaments produced at Washington are sold to the British Ministry of Defence (MoD), but around 25 per cent of the factory’s output is sold to militaries around the world – on the day we visited, the munitions on show were heading to Germany. The BAE group produces loads of products – from vast tank shells to tiny bullets – and the plant at Washington concentrates on medium-sized munitions, including 81mm mortar shells and 155mm bombs that are currently used in Ukraine.