The conflict in Iran is fueling U.S. chatter about restoring the domestic production of tungsten—a supermetal critical to the defense industry.
Tungsten, which is widely used in munitions, reportedly including in Tomahawk missiles, has become exceedingly scarce since China, the leading global producer, put export restrictions on it in 2025. U.S. companies stopped mining tungsten in 2015 when the cost of importing it undercut domestic production costs. But the shortage has spurred some companies to begin exploring U.S. production again.
Tungsten is renowned for its hardiness. Of all the elements on the periodic table, tungsten, first isolated in 1783, has the highest melting point (6,192 degrees Fahrenheit) and boiling point (10,706 degrees F, about the temperature of the sun’s surface). It has the highest tensile strength of all metals and is denser than lead, making it highly desirable for armor-piercing and bunker-busting munitions.
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In 2025 China produced more than 78 percent of the global supply of tungsten, which was nearly 94,000 tons worldwide, according to a report from the U.S. Geological Survey released earlier this year. With the export restrictions, the cost of tungsten ore has steadily increased globally since early 2025. In the U.S., the cost of importing tungsten has increased steadily since 2018, but in recent months the price has had a sharp decline, according to a Scientific American analysis of data compiled by BusinessAnalytiq.
On February 27, in response to the shortage of tungsten and other metals, the Pentagon sent a letter to a group of more than 1,500 companies and academic institutions that work with the U.S. military, urging them to increase domestic production, according to Reuters. The next day, the U.S. launched its first strikes against Iran.
Four weeks later the U.S. had fired more than 850 Tomahawk missiles—more than nine times the amount the Department of Defense usually procures in a year—according to the Washington Post. The U.S. has also used at least 40 of its estimated 90 “Precision Strike Missiles,” according to an April report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. These missiles are designed to explode in midair, spraying more than 180,000 tungsten pellets outward. At the end of March, the New York Times reported that these missiles had been detonated above civilian areas in the Iranian city of Lamerd in February.
With the renewed strikes in Iran, the number of these types of weapons used is likely to grow—NBC News reported that leaders in the defense industry plan to meet this week with the White House about its dwindling supply of missiles.
The U.S. has significant deposits of tungsten across the western parts of the country, according to a USGS report. Aside from its use in weapons, it is an ideal metal for cutting and drilling instruments like saws and bits.
“Your general construction of any sort of infrastructure would be close to impossible without using tungsten, tungsten carbide or tungsten-tipped tools,” says Ali Haji, CEO of American Tungsten.
Haji says that once the tungsten ore is mined, it is usually processed into a concentrate and shipped to a processor that turns it into ammonium paratungstate, or APT. Then the APT is heated to a high temperature in a process called calcination and subsequently reduced with hydrogen to produce the tungsten powder that’s sold to manufacturers and other end users.
American Tungsten hopes to have its Idaho mine site producing the metal by 2027. Haji says he eventually hopes the mine will supply 8 percent of the U.S. demand for tungsten. In February the company announced the results of an initial exploration of the site that suggested it contained large quantities of both tungsten trioxide and silver.
Unlike other hard metals, tungsten is largely nontoxic, but the byproducts from mining it—called tailings—contain other harmful metals including arsenic, copper, zinc and lead and can leach into the environment. Haji says their mine avoids these issues by drilling above the water level.
“We’ve got no discharge coming out from the site, and the grades are, generally speaking, three times higher than the global average that’s in production today,” Haji says.
Almonty Industries, an international mining company, announced it had purchased a tungsten mine in Montana last year and, earlier this year, relocated its headquarters from Toronto to the state.
The U.S. government has also begun to invest in domestic tungsten production projects. In January of last year, the Department of Energy announced it was giving Texas-based MELT Technologies more than $5.7 million to produce tungsten carbide. And the Department of Defense announced a $6.2-million grant to Guardian Metal Resources last year to conduct a prefeasibility study on a mine in Nevada. Neither company responded to requests for comment from Scientific American.
“Developing a domestic source for tungsten is one of our top critical and strategic mineral priorities,” Vic Ramdass, the Defense Department’s acting assistant secretary of defense for industrial base policy, said in a press release announcing the 2025 grant to Guardian Metal Resources.
Recently scientists have been experimenting with tungsten for a different purpose—as shielding nuclear fusion reactors. In 2024 French and American scientists were able to contain plasma at 50 million degrees Celsius for six minutes by using a fusion device called a tokamak clad in tungsten instead of the traditional graphite tiles. But working with it can be challenging, said Luis Delgado-Aparicio, the head of advanced projects at Princeton’s Plasma Physics Laboratory, in a press release. “This is, simply, the difference between trying to grab your kitten at home versus trying to pet the wildest lion.”
As tungsten supplies remain scarce, U.S. industries are adjusting to the supply issue. Drill bit makers who serve the oil and gas industry are replacing tungsten drill bits with steel, which wears more quickly.
Haji says he hopes the U.S. government will help protect the nascent domestic suppliers of the critical supermetal.
“I think some of that responsibility falls upon the government to put some sort of price protection in place, should the Chinese flood the market again,” he says.
“Companies such as ourselves have deployed a lot of capital to bring North American production online.”