Rhodesian chromite embargo and laundering

Rhodesian chrome ore was so uniquely clean it could go straight into steel furnaces. The international embargo was widely circumvented; steel mills knew, but laundered through third countries.

Chromium is not a very good structural material by itself. It melts at over 2000 degrees, makes it a little pricey to process. But it's brittle by itself as a metal. You can take a hammer to it — no fracture. But it's a very important metal. It only comes from a few places in the world. Before you were born, there were all kinds of problems in Rhodesia, and Rhodesia has a chromite ore that you don't even have to clean up. You can just take that rock out of the ground and throw it in a steel-melting furnace. There was an embargo on Rhodesian chrome. You've heard of blood diamonds nowadays — there's a certain type of element where some country has sort of a control, and then they have a civil war. There's the diamonds in Angola, but before that, it was the chromium in Rhodesia. They had a worldwide embargo on Rhodesian chrome, except it was all leaking and getting to the steel mills anyway. Everybody knew it was Rhodesian chrome. It might have come through some other country and been laundered, but you could tell — no one else in the world had that quality of chromite ore. But it comes from India and parts of Russia. It's a strategic material in the sense that we don't have any good US source. We actually have lots of minerals, but we can't extract it cheaply enough compared to these other good deposits.

Another externality is embargoes. From time to time we impose embargoes on different countries. I talked about the Japanese and the oil and steel embargo trying to get them to behave in Nanking and China and not murder all the people. We thought we were doing a good thing. We have embargoes against the North Koreans. We just ended some of our embargoes against Iran. Well, back when I was in elementary school and high school, in the '60s, they had a civil war in Rhodesia — Zimbabwe now is what Rhodesia was. And it turns out Rhodesian chrome ore is the best in the world. This is sort of like the conflict diamonds. This chrome ore is so good you can basically just stick it in the furnace, you don't have to do any processing to upgrade it. It's the richest in the world. It's unmistakable in its appearance.