UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE WASHINGTON: 1945 For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U. S. Government Printing Office, Washington 25, D. C. Price 50 cents to make a survey to find them. Processes for beneficiating lowgrade ores will not, of their own accord, extract an ounce of metal, and many of the other "gains" that I have listed are equally inconclusive. They are merely potential gains. We can use them to our advantage or we can let the opportunity to use them escape us. I hope that a more detailed view of what is left of our diminishing resources will convince all of us that we must make amends for our losses by squeezing the last drop of advantage out of every potential gain that we have at hand. The nine minerals that are plentiful enough in our known domestic reserves to last 100 years or more at a normal rate of use, are iron ore, nitrogen, magnesium, salt, bituminous coal and lignite, phosphate rock, molybdenum, anthracite, and potash. There are only nine of them out of the long list of metals that we must get at home or abroad in quantities as great as we need in order to hold our high place among the nations. Even if we had a hundred years' supply of all of the metals that we need, that would not mean that we would be safe for a century. In the games of war and trade which nations play, a century is only a little while. Military and economic campaigns have been planned that far ahead. Consequently, it behooves us to learn the true meaning of our meager supply, which is not that we will be weak in a hundred years, but that we are relatively weak now. Neither does the possession of a particular metal in great quantity guarantee that we can have all of the products that can be made of that metal so long as it lasts. We must have, in addition, the alloys that go into those products. Manganese is just as important as iron is in the making of most steel, and we have only a 2-year supply of usable manganese ore in our proved domestic reserves. So are vanadium and tungsten as necessary as iron is in making certain steels that are essential in time of peace or war; but we have in our proved domestic reserves only a 7-year supply of vanadium, and a 4-year supply of tungsten. We have less than a 35-year supply of 19 other minerals; among them, petroleum, copper, lead, tin, zinc, nickel, bauxite, chromite, and cadmium. Our reserves of high-grade coking coal are low. We do not know just how low because our knowledge of reserves is not yet so extensive as it should be. Our highest-grade iron ore, the kind that can be mined and smelted most cheaply, would be exhausted in about 22 years at a normal rate of use. The past has not taught us how severely we can be penalized for a lack of metals at the outbreak of a war. It has taught us only that 1 dearth can put us to a severe test. That is the worst that has to us; because we have always had time between the threat al war to get the materials which we lacked, or to |