An earlier ban on ‘rare materials’
The spectacular explosion of the Zeppelin Hindenburg in 1937 was the end of the airship era of commercial travel. I read about the accident in a Tinkle comic right around the time we had a lesson on hydrogen in my high school chemistry class. I recall being puzzled why the Hindenburg was filled with hydrogen when it could explode so easily. How could the designers have been so stupid?
This week I discovered why. It turns out that the United States enacted the Helium Control Act in 1927 declaring that the rare gas was a strategic mineral resource and effectively banned its export. Helium production was put under the control of the government and a National Helium Reserve was created to store it for military and strategic use. Note that this was years before the Nazis came to power in Germany.
Deprived of helium, the German operators of the Zeppelin airships had to use the more dangerous hydrogen instead. This ultimately led to the disaster.
In the aftermath of the tragedy there was some discussion on relaxing the export ban, but by then Hitler was on the march and any hope of reopening the helium trade ended with the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938.
The geopolitics of critical minerals didn’t start in the past decade.