Inkstick report: Building explodes at Northrop Grumman’s Utah missile plant.
Military-Industrial America
By Taylor Barnes
The following report was originally published by Inkstick, a nonprofit news platform. It is reprinted here with permission.
An explosion destroyed a building at Northrop Grumman’s Promontory missile and rocket plant in Utah’s West Desert on Wednesday morning, according to a press release from the Box Elder County Sheriff’s Office and an email sent to Northrop Grumman employees.
The email, shared with Inkstick, said that there was an “explosive incident” at the Promontory North Plant on Wednesday morning, which the Sheriff’s office said occurred at 7:38am. The email to employees said that all employees were safe and accounted for.
A photo from the Sheriff's office showed an incinerated building with bare beams exposed and plumes of smoke and flames still visible in the hilly West Desert area. A fire in the area burned for at least an hour and a half.
Eric Olsen, the communications director for the Utah Labor Commission, told Inkstick that Utah’s Occupational Safety and Health division was aware of the incident but was not investigating since there were no reports of injuries. Box Elder County Sheriff Cade Palmer told Inkstick that Northrop Grumman was “managing the incident” and that inquiries should be directed to their media representative.
Spokespeople for Northrop Grumman did not respond to phone calls and emails from Inkstick.
The six mile-long plant, which was originally constructed in 1957, is closely watched by nuclear weapons observers since it is the final assembly plant for the new Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile. Once manufactured, the Air Force intends to load hundreds of those ICBMs with warheads and drop them into silos across the American West, where they will be on continuous alert for launch orders to shoot over the North Pole and reach Russia or China in about 30 minutes.
Northrop Grumman did not respond to questions about which programs may be affected by the building’s destruction. The plant works on systems in addition to the Sentinel ICBM, such as rockets for NASA and the Space Force. A spokesman for Hill Air Force Base, which oversees the nuclear missile produced at the plant, did not respond to a phone call and email from Inkstick.
The future of the Sentinel program may be in doubt. The Air Force in February officially stopped work on designing new silos for the ICBM and announced that it was preparing to life-extend the existing Minuteman III missile until 2050. In 2020, the Pentagon estimated that the Sentinel missile would cost $78 billion; just four years later, the cost estimate had jumped 81%, to $141 billion. The Trump administration recently named Sentinel among a list of weapons programs to be “scrutinized” for potential cancellation.
Read more, including details on Northrop Grumman's history of workplace injury and deaths at Utah facilities, at Inkstick.
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