Rha6 Apr 2025 19:37
China says no tungsten to US. RHA may now also be of interest to someone.
Then there’s tungsten. The metal that makes bullets bulletproof. Literally. Tungsten is what you use when you need to cut, drill, punch, or penetrate anything harder than stale marshmallow. The U.S. hasn’t produced meaningful amounts of it since the Obama administration, and China sits on 80% of global production. Oh, sure, you can try Vietnam or Portugal, but good luck getting those volumes at scale without waiting years and paying triple. Tungsten isn’t just in ammunition. It’s in the tiny vertical connections between layers of circuitry in semiconductor chip, CNC machine tools, and high-performance alloys that go into everything from jet engines to deep-drilling rigs. When China put tungsten behind a licensing wall, it wasn’t targeting one sector—it was targeting the industrial base of a specific big country (America)that’s trying to re-grow precision manufacturing at scale.