On 11 October 2022 a prefectoral order recorded the change of operator at the nitrocellulose installations of the Bergerac industrial platform, where EURENCO succeeded MANUCO, a company it had acquired and then absorbed by merger. The order came ten weeks after explosions had damaged one of MANUCO’s nitrocellulose buildings, and at a time when an emergency order still required all operations on equipment that had contained nitrocellulose to cease. The sequence captures a problem that the expansion of European ammunition and propellant production makes increasingly practical. Groups buying energetic-materials plants, banks lending against them and governments counting on their output tend to treat the plant as a single asset that changes hands. In law it is not. The installation, the company that operates it, the authorisation to produce military explosives, the persons legally responsible for handling them and every later change to the process are distinct objects, held by different subjects, created by different authorities and affected in different ways by a purchase of shares, a merger or a conversion. A buyer can therefore own the buildings, the equipment and the company and still be unable to produce. The question that follows is precise: when the owner, the legal person or the operator of a European energetic-materials plant changes, which authorisations survive, which must be notified, which must be granted again, and at what point does the purchase of a plant stop coinciding with capacity that can lawfully be used?