The Tungsten Market Is Warning of an Upcoming War

In the middle of a conversation about tungsten’s military history, Bloomberg Opinion columnist David Fickling mentions that the price of tungsten stored in Rotterdam warehouses has gone from about $300 per dry metric ton unit in 2022 to over $3,000 today. That tenfold spike is not driven by a sudden boom in drill-bit manufacturing. It is driven by China’s export controls on a metal that has, for more than a century, served as a kind of prediction market for war. And it is why a flooded mine on a windswept beach off Tasmania—the Dolphin Mine—is reopening after 35 years of silence.

Tungsten as a bellwether for conflict

Tungsten is not like copper or oil, where demand is steady and predictable. It is a metal that becomes essential only when large-scale conventional war looms. Its value comes from two physical properties: it is about as dense as gold, and it has the highest melting point of any metal—over 3,000 degrees Celsius. That combination makes it ideal for armor-piercing projectiles (it holds its shape instead of mushrooming on impact) and for cluster munitions, where tiny tungsten pellets create a metal rain that destroys anything in the vicinity. In peacetime, 80% of tungsten goes into mundane tungsten carbide tooling—drill bits, mining equipment, oil-well drills. But when war is imminent, military buyers will pay almost any price.