In Berry, the KNDS factory is running at full speed to provide shells to Ukraine – Liberation

The articulated arm of the robot raises the heavy oblong room in the air, delicately introduces it into a machine. At each stage of the machining, the steel is refined, takes shape, is polished. At the exit of the chain, two young operators check the quality of each 155 mm bus body, carefully lustrating the brilliant object with clean lines. “The forges of Tarbes send us outbursts. Here, we only deal with the sensitive, high technicality ”, Explains one of the executives of the KNDS factory (ex-NEXTER) in La Chapelle-Saint-Ursin, in the Cher.

After the murderous explosion of a Grenades factory on rue de Tolbiac, in Paris, in 1915, the factory was relocated to the Berrichonne countryside, where it was later bombed by the Germans. Today, the workshops are scattered out of 170 hectares to avoid chain reactions in the event of an accident. By a reversal of history, it is in this same factory that the Franco-Germany KNDS, European leader in terrestrial defense, makes all of the average and large caliber ammunition drawn by the cannons of light vehicles, tanks, planes and boats in the French army. It has been running at full speed since the Russian invasion in Ukraine again resonated the cannons in Europe, with a rate comparable to that of the First World War.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the advent of hypersonic missiles and