There was a time when miners hated tungsten…
They didn’t know what it was. They only knew that when a certain dark, unusually heavy mineral showed up alongside the tin they were trying to process, something went wrong.
The tin valuable tin they were trying to extract would simply disappear.
And that’s where the troublesome mineral first got its name as medieval miners in central Europe called it wolfram, a name commonly associated with a wolf devouring its prey.
Later, another tungsten-bearing mineral received a different name in Sweden: tung sten, or “heavy stone.”
And what miners once considered a contaminant would eventually become one of the most important metals in modern civilization…
Tungsten would help factories run faster, cities stay lit, mines drill deeper, aircraft fly farther, and armies build more effective weapons.
Eventually, nations would wage economic warfare over access to it.
And today, China appears to understand tungsten’s strategic power just as well as the Allies did during World War II.
From Waste Rock to Wonder Metal
Tungsten’s scientific story began in 1781, when Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele isolated tungstic acid from the mineral now known as scheelite.
Two years later, Spanish brothers Juan José and Fausto Elhuyar isolated the metal itself from wolframite.
And finally, the mystery had been solved.
But tungsten proved incredibly difficult to work with.
And that difficulty comes from the same characteristic that later made it so valuable: tungsten has the highest melting point of any metal, roughly 3,422 degrees Celsius.
It is also extremely dense, extremely hard, highly wear-resistant, and capable of maintaining useful properties under temperatures that destroy many conventional materials.
So, for much of the 1800s, those traits were more scientific curiosity than commercial opportunity.
But then industrialization changed everything…
Factories were learning to make things faster, but cutting tools imposed a limit: traditional steel tools heated up at high speeds, softened, and lost their edge.
Tungsten helped solve that problem.
And by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, tungsten-containing high-speed steels allowed cutting tools to operate dramatically faster without losing hardness.
Faster cutting meant faster manufacturing, and faster manufacturing meant more gears, engines, vehicles, machinery, and eventually weapons rolling off factory floors.
Then came tungsten-filament lightbulbs. And then came tungsten carbide…
It turned out that when you combine tungsten with carbon, you get one of the hardest industrial materials ever commercialized…
One that’s capable of cutting steel, drilling rock, boring mines, and surviving conditions that completely destroy ordinary tooling.
And by the early 20th century, tungsten had gone from a mining nuisance to an industrial necessity. And that made it a military necessity too…
The Metal Behind the War Machine
World War I showed governments how dependent modern warfare had become on obscure industrial materials and tungsten was one of them…
Remember, it wasn’t simply used in weapons; it also went into the tools that made the weapons…
High-speed steels and tungsten-carbide tools allowed factories to machine the precision parts needed for artillery, engines, vehicles, aircraft, and other military equipment.
A tungsten shortage could wreak havoc on an entire war economy.
And by World War II, every major power understood this…
Nazi Germany possessed tremendous manufacturing capacity but lacked secure domestic tungsten supplies.
And it needed tungsten for machine tools and for tungsten-carbide cores used in armor-piercing ammunition.
So, once wartime supply routes from Asia became unreliable, Spain and Portugal became crucial.
And their wolfram deposits turned the Iberian Peninsula into another front in the war.
But this front wasn’t fought with tanks…
It was fought with money.
The Wolfram War
You see, Britain and the United States understood that they didn’t necessarily have to destroy German factories to weaken them…
Instead, they could simply starve those factories of tungsten.
So, the Allies began aggressively buying Spanish and Portuguese wolfram, including material they didn’t necessarily need themselves.
The strategy was simple…
If the Allies bought the tungsten first, Germany couldn’t.
Allied officials estimated Germany needed roughly 4,300 tons annually just for essential industrial purposes, with additional tungsten required for armor-piercing ammunition.
And by competing for scarce Iberian supply, the Allies reduced the amount Germany could obtain, drove prices higher, and forced German buyers to fight for every remaining ton.
By late 1943, Allied officials believed Axis tungsten stockpiles were approaching exhaustion…
So, Washington and London intensified pressure on Spain and Portugal to restrict exports to Germany.
By 1944, Spain had caved and sharply curtailed shipments, and Portugal imposed an embargo.
Now, tungsten didn’t win World War II by itself…
But the Wolfram War proved something enormously important.
If an industrial power depends on a scarce material, controlling access to that material can become a weapon.
Which brings us to today…
China Learned the Same Lesson
China now dominates the global tungsten market.
And Beijing has made no secret of its willingness to use critical-mineral dominance as geopolitical leverage.
In February 2025, China imposed new export controls on tungsten-related materials and technologies, requiring government permission before certain products could leave the country.
That alone would be significant. But China has also been working the other side of the equation…
Chinese buyers have been aggressively pursuing tungsten-bearing scrap in the United States, reportedly offering American suppliers prices domestic buyers struggle to match, sometimes as high as five times prevailing prices.
And that should sound familiar…
China restricts tungsten leaving China. Then Chinese buyers compete aggressively for tungsten already sitting inside America.
More tungsten stays available to Chinese industry. Less remains available to ours…
And American manufacturers have to pay more for whatever they can still secure.
Now, we don’t need Beijing to publish a strategy memo explaining why China might want to do this because history already showed us…
The Allies used the same economic weapon against Germany: buy scarce tungsten, deny it to a geopolitical rival, and make every remaining ton more difficult and expensive to obtain.
China is now in a position to apply that same pressure against the United States.
And Washington has finally begun reacting.
This summer, the U.S. government moved to restrict exports of critical-mineral-rich scrap, specifically including tungsten, and announced a one-year prohibition on exports of tungsten-containing scrap beginning August 27.
Think about how extraordinary that is…
America is now trying to stop its own tungsten from leaving the country because access to the metal has become a national-security concern.
The Wolf Comes Full Circle
For centuries, humans had tungsten under their feet and didn’t understand what they had.
Miners cursed it because it interfered with tin. Chemists studied it because it behaved strangely.
Industrialists embraced it because it let machines work faster and survive hotter conditions.
And armies coveted it because modern warfare increasingly depended on it.
Then governments learned that controlling tungsten could provide leverage over an adversary without ever firing a shot.
That lesson was written plainly during World War II…
The Allies used access to tungsten as a weapon against Germany.
And today, China has spent decades building dominance over the same strategic material while the United States allowed much of its own mining, processing, and recycling capacity to disappear.
Now Beijing is restricting its supply while Chinese buyers chase ours.
The players have changed. The strategy hasn’t either…
And neither has the fundamental lesson:
A country that cannot secure the raw materials behind its factories, technologies, and weapons becomes dependent on the country that can.
Tungsten began its history as the wolf that ate the tin. But today, the real danger is letting someone else control the wolf.