The Tailings of Cold War U.S. Foreign Policy

Abstract

Start with manganese (Mn). With an atomic number of twenty-five, Mn sits next to chromium and iron in the middle of an industrially indispensable row of what are called “transition metals” on the periodic table. The element is named for the Greek region of Magnesia—confusingly also the origin of the chemically very different magnesium, itself not to be confused with the magnetic lodestone also associated with the region—and in its most common form as manganese oxide it has been used for pigmentation and in glassmaking since antiquity. It is also essential to good steelmaking. At high temperatures, manganese forms a high-melting sulfide, preventing the formation of liquid iron sulfide and making high temperature steel more workable. Steel alloys of between eight percent and twelve percent manganese achieve significantly higher tensile strength, and as a deoxidizer manganese helps prevent corrosion and wear, especially in low-cost stainless steel. Aluminum, vanadium, and a number of other transition metals have similar properties to manganese, but as the authors of a 1952 report to U.S. President Harry Truman’s administration on the United States’ long-term material supply needs noted, in the early 1950s—as today—there was really no practical way to produce steel at an industrial scale without manganese. And in the 1950s, with steel a vital commodity at the heart of the U.S. civilian and military economies, the United States did not produce very much manganese.1