On the morning of Friday, October 10, a massive explosion obliterated a building at Accurate Energetic Systems (AES), a military explosives plant in rural Tennessee, killing 16 workers in one of the worst industrial disasters in the United States in decades. The blast near the town of Bucksnort, felt more than 20 miles away, left only the charred debris of the building and burned-out vehicles in the parking lot.
“There’s nothing to describe, it’s gone,” said Humphreys County Sheriff Chris Davis. “More than 300 people have been over every square inch and found no survivors.”
The names of the workers killed have not yet been released. Authorities are identifying victims through DNA testing because no recognizable remains were recovered. Residents told reporters the deaths struck a community already devastated by the 2021 floods that killed 20 people.
The corporate media also decided that “There’s nothing to describe,” but in the sense that they would write as little as possible about the disaster. Within days, national news outlets dropped the story entirely. Sixteen workers were incinerated in a US weapons plant—the largest mass death in an industrial disaster since the 2010 Upper Big Branch mine explosion—and the networks and other corporate media simply moved on.
The New York Times buried the story on page A17 of its Sunday print edition, and there is no mention of it on the front page of its website. The Washington Post, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, has a small article, buried on its front page. The Wall Street Journal does not have even that, with no mention of the explosion on its front page. Jacobin magazine, the flagship of the Democratic Socialists of America, presents itself as a publication concerned with the interests of the working class, but is in fact a faction of the Democratic Party. It has published nothing on the disaster in Tennessee.
This silence exposes the contempt of the corporate media and political establishment for the lives of workers, along with a fear that the unending carnage in the industrial slaughterhouse of American capitalism will fuel mass anger and rebellion. The media blackout coincides with the deliberate downplaying of Trump’s plans to invoke the Insurrection Act and establish military rule to crush opposition.
Accurate Energetic Systems supplies explosives and demolition charges for the US Army and major defense contractors. It has received more than $120 million in recent contracts for TNT and plastic-bonded explosives.
AES’s 1,300-acre complex has a long record of violations. In 2014, an explosion killed one worker and injured three others in a building run by Rio Ammunition. In 2019, state inspectors cited “serious” hazards after AES employees suffered seizures from exposure to cyclonite (RDX), an explosive linked to nervous-system damage. Residue was found on worktables and even in the break room, yet fines were quietly reduced to $7,200.
One year later, according to the UK’s Daily Mail, maintenance supervisor Greg McRee stopped a fire in the same “Melt-Pour” building that has now been destroyed—using only a garden hose. “On Friday, I was a hero. On Monday, I was a piece of crap,” he said after being fired for “violating policy.” The company reportedly ignored the unsafe conditions he had reported.
The Tennessee tragedy confirms warnings made at the July 27 public hearing convened by the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) into the death of Stellantis worker Ronald Adams Sr. at the Dundee Engine Plant in Michigan. Adams, 63, was killed amid a rush to restart production while basic safety measures were bypassed.
“These tragedies are not accidents,” explained Mack Trucks worker and IWA-RFC leader Will Lehman. “They are the outcome of a system that subordinates human life to profit. That a company is demonstrating it is willing to socially murder more than 20 percent of its workforce is an immense step forward on the class war that’s escalating in the US.
“As we said at the public hearing for Ronald Adams Sr., we insist that workers’ lives matter. For that to happen, we need to build rank-and-file committees in every factory and workplace to put production and safety under the control of workers, not the corporations and their accomplices in the union bureaucracy.”
Every year more than 5,000 US workers die from traumatic injuries, the vast majority of which go unreported anywhere in the media. Another 120,000 die from occupational diseases caused by toxic exposures and long-term hazards. The Trump administration has placed OSHA under the control of David Keeling, a former UPS and Amazon executive who opposed even heat protections for delivery drivers. The ongoing government shutdown is being used to slash “non-essential” safety enforcement.
The union apparatus shares responsibility. The UAW has remained silent about the deaths of Adams and other Stellantis workers. Its “joint labor-management safety” programs prioritize production speed over life.
UAW President Shawn Fain has aligned the bureaucracy with the Pentagon’s war drive, selling out strikes at defense firms such as GE Aerospace and suppressing others at GM General, which manufactures military vehicles. Fain has praised the union’s collaboration with the Roosevelt administration during World War II—a partnership that banned strikes, jailed socialists, and placed industry under war-time military discipline.
The explosion in Tennessee is inseparable from the US military-industrial buildup for global war. Military.com recently observed that “when production rises, so do the risks for the workers and small towns where that work takes place.” Wartime demand, it explained, means speed-ups, cost-cutting, and the abandonment of oversight.
US and NATO buildups for wars in Ukraine and Gaza—and preparations for conflict with China—have triggered an expansion of arms production in the US and around the world. Explosions and fires have occurred in munitions plants from Arkansas to Virginia, as small towns once again bear the deadly burden of “re-industrialization for war.”
According to the Quincy Institute, private firms received $2.4 trillion in Pentagon contracts from 2020 to 2024—more than half of all Defense Department spending. Five corporations—Lockheed Martin, RTX (Raytheon), Boeing, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman—accounted for $771 billion of that total. US military spending now exceeds $1 trillion a year.
While executives enrich themselves, the workers who produce their weapons are maimed or killed. In St. Louis, 3,200 Boeing workers have been striking for two months against low wages and unsafe conditions; the company is using strikebreakers. Trump, acting as the open political agent of the corporate-military elite, has threatened to deploy troops to major US cities to crush “disorder”—a clear warning that the same methods used to suppress protests will be used against defense and industrial workers who resist the war economy.
The deliberate burying of the Tennessee catastrophe is part of this campaign. The Trump administration is waging an all-out war on the working class—the central target of its drive toward dictatorship—while the Democratic Party largely agrees with its social program and works to contain popular resistance. Television networks and major newspapers, owned by the same conglomerates that profit from militarism, offered a few perfunctory reports before turning to celebrity gossip and election polls. No national debate, no nightly updates, no congressional outrage.
The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) insists that the defense of life and safety cannot be entrusted to corporations, the state, or their accomplices in the union apparatus. Workers must form independent rank-and-file safety committees with full authority to halt production over unsafe conditions, demand release of all safety data, and hold company officials criminally responsible for deaths and injuries.
This fight is inseparable from the struggle against war and dictatorship. The same system that sends workers to die on the battlefield also sacrifices them in the factories that feed the war machine. The military-industrial complex must be converted to produce for human need—schools, hospitals, housing and safe workplaces—instead of destruction.
The explosion in Tennessee is a warning. Unless the working class intervenes consciously to take control of production, more towns will burn, more workers will die, and more families will identify their loved ones by DNA. The alternative is clear: the international unification of the working class to abolish the profit system and build a socialist society based on human need, not corporate profit.
The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) calls on all workers to come forward with any information about the explosion in Tennessee or other industrial accidents in the United States and internationally. Contact the WSWS using the form below. For details on the rank-and-file investigation into the death of Stellantis worker Ronald Adams Sr., click here.