Mineral Resource Dependency Crisis 55 would thus undermine the potential of a strategic supply strategy to offset cartelization and complete vulnerability to foreign chromium dependency. Information Subsystem and Resource Dependency Information-related minerals and materials are increasingly relevant to resource dependency. Although the quantities needed are not measured in the tonnages associated with basic metals, the qualities or properties sought impose new definitions of what is critical and strategic. Semi-conductor crystals are designed on the basis of assumed supplies of indium anti-monide and mercury and cadmium telluride. Such minerals provide sensors with the properties which allow heat-emission information images. Sound wave sensors are being developed which require aluminum phosphate (berlinite), and zirconium and titanium dioxide are in demand for information measurement of air/fuel ratios in automobile exhaust systems. Computers require cobalt for the electric motors in tape transporters, printers and disc drives; the industry accounts for nearly 15% of total U.S. annual consumption. The cobalt supply concentration in Zaire and Zambia once more determines the stability of an industry which is essential to national security. Substitutes are possible but with sacrifices in reliability and performance, as in the automobile industry which attempted to switch away from cobalt and lost its superior light-weight magnetic advantages in electric motors. Although "bubble" memory advances have called for the consumption of lesser known gadolinium-iron-garnet, computer consumption of gold is well-established. But the escalation of the price of gold has forced gold-thinning and plating. A tin-for-gold substitution in printed circuits. created serious problems of performance and has been largely abandoned. Information subsystem resource dependency imposes planning (research and development) constraints which are not always solved by paying any price for a supply-short mineral. Defense dependency on information technology is clear, but in the case of beryllium metal the supply vulnerability has reached critical proportions. Optical (information) applications in U.S. missiles require beryllium supply. There is no substitute available. Yet government health standards have threatened to drive the last U.S. producer/processor out of the business. Since these standards cannot be met by establishing engineering abatement technologies, beryllium metal production could cease to the entire West (a U.S. company has sole non-Communist world capacity). U.S. defense-related missile production and nuclear development requirements in beryllium metal rule out foreign dependency. Our national security obviously depends on beryllium metal supply, and the stockpile is 56 The Resource War in 3-D seriously deficient in that form. The Soviet Union, however, has not only announced breakthroughs in beryllium performance, after years of intensive research, but is the only other producer of the metal in the world. It is inconceivable that the Defense Department would tolerate the Soviet Union as its supplier. All three subsystems reveal resource dependency in different stages of development. U.S. aerospace, labor and information technology require mineral resources. But each has been traditionally viewed without the linkage to national security and defense. Technological advance is inconceivable without secure material flows from world and domestic sources. The emergence of Soviet geopolitical influence over world sources of those flows is the setting for resources wars. Resource dependency is a principal uncertainty in the management of the industrial West and Japan. Yet the outline of what policies are needed to guide the United States from reactive to strategic resource dependency is not yet in view. 1. The assumption that the Soviet Union is a residual supplier of minerals to the United States in the case of supply disruption of South African strategic minerals suggests implicitly a potential resource dependency on Moscow. This presumes Soviet capacity and political cooperation with the United States in raw materials problems a condition perhaps of Detente. This presumption is viewed as highly improbable in the analysis which follows. 2. See the Report on the Issues Identified in the Nonfuel Mineral Policy Review: Draft for Public Review and Comment, August, 1979. 3. Istvan Dobozi, "Problems of Raw-Material Supply in Eastern Europe," The World Economy I (January 1978), p. 213. 4. I. Kapranov, "The USSR's Economic and Technical Cooperation with Other Countries in 1977," Foreign Trade 6 (1978), pp. 19-31. 5. For a full discussion, see B. Kozintsev and P. Koshelev, "Economic Cooperation of the USSR with Countries of Tropical Africa," Foreign Trade 2 (1978), pp. 26-30. 6. For a comprehensive summary, see Thomas W. Walde, "Transnational Investment in the Natural Resource Industries," Law & Policy in International Business 11 (1979), pp. 691-774. 7. Richard C. Mulready, Director of Technical Planning, Pratt and Whitney Aircraft Group, "Minerals and Materials: Can We Avoid Catastrophe?", Congressional Research Service Seminar, November 19, 1979. 8. U.S. General Accounting Office, Report to the Congress of the United States: The U.S. Mining and Mineral Processing Industry: An Analysis of Trends and Implications, by the Comptroller General (Washington, D.C.: United States General Accounting Office, October 31, 1979), pp. 57-61. 9. John E. Elliott, "Uses of Energy in the Production of Steel," Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (Mimeographed.) 10. U.S. General Accounting Office, Report to the Congress, p. 42. 11. U.S. International Trade Commission, High Carbon Ferrochrome: Report to the President on Investigation No. TA-201-28 Under Section 201 of the Trane Act of 1974, USITC Publication 845, December 1977; Report to the President on Investigation No. TA-201-35, USITC Publication 911, September 1978. |