The Tungsten Market Is Warning of an Upcoming War

The core argument. David Fickling's framing: tungsten operates like a century-old, informal prediction market for war. When traders and miners sense conflict is coming, capital flows into tungsten before governments place large military orders — "a bit like a sort of century-old missing prediction market for war," as he put it. The clearest evidence is a single mine: the Dolphin mine on a beach in Tasmania, which first opened in 1917 during WWI, closed when the war ended and European governments dumped their stockpiles, reopened in 1938 ahead of WWII, struggled after that war but was rescued by the Korean War, slowed around Sputnik as military doctrine shifted, limped through Vietnam, and finally shut in 1990 when it flooded. It has sat dormant for roughly three decades and is now restarting.

The mechanism. Tungsten's value is physical: its density is close to gold's, and its melting point exceeds 3,000°C — three times hotter than lava — so it holds its shape under extreme heat and pressure. That makes it ideal for armor-piercing projectiles (it punches through tank armor rather than mushrooming) and for cluster-munition shrapnel, where tiny tungsten pellets create a dense "metal rain." Roughly 80% of global tungsten actually goes into mundane tungsten carbide tooling — drill bits for mining, oil wells, and auto shops. Turbine blades for jet engines and gas turbines (used in data-center power and LNG compression) can be up to 10% tungsten alloy; a small, catalytic use exists in oil refining (~5%); and there's a reportedly tiny use in some AI chips. Fickling notes that when Nazi Germany ran short of tungsten late in WWII, it diverted supply from tooling to weapons — degrading tank machinery so badly that captured German equipment often didn't work properly.

What has to be true. China supplies roughly 80% of global tungsten — not through policy alone but because it has the best-grade, longest-worked deposits; North Korea and Russia add another ~5%, leaving about 15% as the "free world" market. If the Dolphin mine reaches production, Fickling estimates it could supply about 2.5% of total global tungsten — which sounds small until measured against that free-world slice: roughly one-sixth of it. The financing behind the mine is unusual: total cash invested over 20 years of restart attempts is about $77 million, on a company with roughly A$7 million in equity, funded almost entirely without banks. Shareholders include a Red Bull heir, money traced to a Peabody Energy coal-mine payout, a retired Caterpillar dealer who worked the mine in the 1960s, the Tasmanian state government, and equipment lessors who took equity in lieu of unpaid bills.

The deeper structural problem, per Fickling, is that tungsten has no futures market or forward curve — unlike copper on the LME or COMEX — so banks can't underwrite five-to-ten-year mine economics against a hedgeable price. Investor Alex Turnbull is cited as saying a "reasonable" price could be anywhere from $300 to $3,300 per dry metric ton unit (dmtu) depending on whether China restricts supply. The one available data point — Rotterdam warehouse tungsten (as ammonium paratungstate) — moved from about $300/dmtu in 2022 to over $3,000/dmtu currently, equivalent to roughly $400,000 per metric ton (1 dmtu ≈ 7.93 kg). Fickling attributes much of that spike to Chinese export controls imposed around when Trump took office in 2025 — controls that triggered stockpiling by tungsten-dependent buyers rather than an outright supply halt. If those controls are lifted, he says the speculative premium unwinds, prices fall, and higher-cost miners outside China — most of whom sit above that elevated cost base — face bankruptcy risk. This has happened before: the Dolphin mine's original 1920 closure came when Allied governments sold off WWI stockpiles and flooded the market.

Fickling's policy prescription is a floor price for tungsten specifically, since "the only economic supply of tungsten is in China" — but he flags the difficulty of scoping this: almost any input can be labeled critical (he cites citric acid, where China holds 65–70% of supply, used in candy, pharmaceuticals and industrial descaling). He's skeptical of the U.S.'s proposed $12 billion "Project Vault" critical-minerals reserve, warning that without clear criteria it risks subsidizing price security for common commodities like copper, nickel, aluminum and metallurgical coal rather than genuinely scarce, strategic materials like tungsten.

On why the West let this capability lapse: Fickling traces it to a post-1990 reassessment of war itself. The Gulf War convinced U.S. planners that technological superiority would make future conflicts short and low-attrition (echoing Chris Miller's Chip War thesis that chips, not tonnage, won the Cold War), reducing the perceived need for tungsten-heavy munitions stockpiles. Ukraine's grinding, attritional war — plus the prospect of a Taiwan conflict against a peer manufacturing power where U.S. tech dominance can't be assumed — has reversed that calculus, which is the proximate reason the Dolphin mine is restarting now. He also notes a parallel dynamic in rare earths: ionic-absorption clays, once believed unique to southern China, are now being found in Brazil, Malaysia, Australia and tropical Africa as Chinese export restrictions push exploration elsewhere — and that Japan, after China cut off rare-earth and tungsten exports previously, absorbed much of the shock through recycled scrap tungsten, though he doubts scrap alone could replace a total Chinese export halt.