| ISSUE 010 · MATERIALS, CAPACITY, CONVERSION | |
| The rearmament ledger has learned to count machine tools again. Ask what those machines cut with and the ledger goes quiet. On a lathe or a mill, the edge that meets the steel is usually a small tip of cemented tungsten carbide, pressed from powder, sintered, and replaced when it wears. | |
| Cemented carbide parts took an estimated 60 percent of the tungsten consumed in the United States, for cutting and wear surfaces in metalworking, mining, oil and gas drilling and construction, according to the US Geological Survey’s Mineral Commodity Summaries of February 2026. Tungsten heavy alloy, a separate product, goes into armour-piercing projectiles. | |
| China mined 67,000 of an estimated 85,000 tonnes of tungsten in 2025 and placed tungsten items under export control that February; the United States has mined none commercially since 2015 (USGS, February 2026). Rotterdam ammonium paratungstate rose from $331 to $675 per metric ton unit over 2025, the survey reports. From 1 January 2027 the Pentagon’s sourcing clause, DFARS 252.225-7052, reaches back to the mine for tungsten metal powder and tungsten heavy alloy. Cemented carbide is not on its list. | |
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| PLATE · CARBIDE-TIPPED CUTTING TOOLS, UNITED STATES, 1941 |
| The United States began rationing machine tools in December 1940. On 31 January 1941 the priorities office announced that builders had been asked to deliver no machine tool after 28 February to any customer lacking a priority rating, according to Defense, the bulletin of the National Defense Advisory Commission, on 4 February 1941. Output rose from about 7,000 units a year in the 1930s to a peak annual rate of 365,000 in August 1942, by Alexander Field’s count in the Economic History Review (2023). |
| The tips on those machines had a separate history. On 21 October 1941 a federal grand jury indicted General Electric, its Carboloy subsidiary and Krupp under the Sherman Act over cemented carbide. The 1948 judgment records a first American price of $453 a pound against production costs of six to twelve cents a gram, and a patent position that held from 1928 until a Michigan court voided key patents in 1940. |
| Defence counsel put total American carbide sales in 1935 at about 4,500,000 grams. The machine was the counted object, rationed by priority rating; the cutting material was a separate layer, measured in grams and run through one pool of patents. |
| PLATE · TUNGSTEN POWDER PLANT, TOWANDA, PENNSYLVANIA | |||
| Global Tungsten & Powders operates a century-old, 400-worker complex in Towanda, Pennsylvania, owned by Austria’s Plansee Group. It produced more than 12,000 of the 117,000 metric tons of tungsten powder made worldwide in 2025, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported on 11 February 2026. The site makes ammonium paratungstate, tungsten oxide, metal powder, carbide powder and ready-to-press grades. | |||
| Karlheinz Wex, Plansee’s executive board chairman, told the paper: “Our tungsten supply is 70% scrap recycling, from tools and drill bits.” He said Towanda was running at capacity and sold out six to nine months ahead. | |||
| New mined concentrate is contracted from the reopened Sangdong mine in South Korea and from Nyakabingo in Rwanda. The Rwandan material leaves through Mombasa, lands at Newark or another East Coast port, and is trucked to Towanda. | |||
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| Every supply figure carries a date and a source in the text. Not a footnote. In the sentence. | |||
| FREE. NO STOCK PICKS. NO PREDICTIONS. | |||
| Nothing here is investment advice. No company is named as an investment. |
