the Federal Search for strategic Mineral Supply: Cuban Nickel, Western Manganese, andTwenty Six Federal Mining Investigations from the Postwar United States, 1947 to 1957

US Department of the Interior Strategic Mineral Mining

Book

Postwar American mineral research archive from 1947 to 1957, comprising twenty six United States Bureau of Mines *Reports of Investigations* on how the federal government tried to make more of the nation's mineral wealth economically usable, from low grade manganese ores and precious metal recovery to drilling, blasting, and large scale extraction. The reports were produced during a time of American postwar expansion, when wartime productive capacity fed mass construction, automobiles, infrastructure, consumer manufacturing, and military rearmament, all dependent upon reliable supplies of processed metals and minerals. Bureau laboratories tested whether marginal ores could be made economically usable and developed methods that entered industrial practice. In the 1955 "Nickel Cobalt Resources of Cuba," this federal resource program extended beyond American territory: the Bureau surveyed Cuba's nickel and cobalt while the United States government owned and expanded the Nicaro processing plant on the island, where Cuban ore was being converted into nickel for American strategic use, history is a again repeating itself as the federal government half a century later is now again doubling its efforts to find strategic minerals that are the basis for the silicon industry.

United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Mines. "Reports of Investigations." 1947 to 1957. Twenty six reports: five from 1947, three from 1948, two from 1949, one from 1951, six from 1952, one from 1953, three from 1954, two from 1955, two from 1956, and one from 1957; approximately 13 to 79 pages each, stapled and hole punched in printed wrappers. The early reports are particularly concentrated in manganese research, including "Beneficiation of Western Manganese Ores" and investigations of oxide manganese deposits at Long Valley, Artillery Peak, Havasu Lake, Aguila, and other Arizona and western sites. These studies emerged from a problem made acute during World War II, when manganese was indispensable to steelmaking but the United States remained heavily dependent on foreign ore. Other reports address the Mount Eielson zinc lead deposits in Alaska, the South Hecla polymetallic mine in Utah, recovery of gold and silver from activated carbon, oxidized copper ores in Nevada, diamond orientation and diamond bit performance, physical properties of mine rock, underground openings at the Rifle, Colorado, oil shale mine, and millisecond delay blasting. The 1955 "Nickel Cobalt Resources of Cuba" surveys one of the hemisphere's major nickel bearing regions at a moment when United States involvement was unusually direct. The federal government had constructed the Nicaro processing complex during World War II to obtain nickel from Cuban lateritic ores, shut the operation after the war when production proved uneconomic, and returned it to operation during the Korean War as strategic demand increased. By the time McMillan and Davis published their survey, geological investigation, metallurgical research, government ownership, private industrial operation, and foreign policy had converged around the same Cuban resource. This copy bears the stamp “Released By Exxon Production Research Co.,” while Wilbur I. Duvall and Thomas C. Atchison's 1957 "Rock Breakage by Explosives" carries both an Exxon release stamp and “Houston Research Library / Humble Oil And Refg. Co. / Jul 14 1960,” documenting the subsequent use of federal mining research within the petroleum industry's technical library system.

The Cuban report exposes a feature of American power in the first half of the twentieth century that is less visible in the purely domestic investigations. After the Spanish American War, the United States occupied Cuba from 1898 to 1902 and imposed the Platt Amendment as a condition of Cuban independence, preserving a legal basis for intervention and securing the naval station at Guantánamo Bay. Although the intervention provisions were abandoned in 1934, American influence continued through investment, trade, corporate ownership, military cooperation, and control of infrastructure and productive assets. Nickel added a strategic mineral dimension to that relationship. The Nicaro plant was built with United States government capital during World War II, revived during the Korean War, expanded during the 1950s, and treated by American defense officials as part of the country's industrial mobilization capacity. In this setting, a Bureau of Mines survey of Cuban nickel and cobalt was not simply a neutral geological description of a neighboring country's resources. It belonged to the administrative process by which mineral deposits abroad could be measured, classified, processed, and incorporated into American industrial planning. The reports also record an earlier environmental regime. Their governing questions concern how deposits can be located, concentrated, drilled, blasted, and exploited efficiently, with conservation generally understood through reduction of waste and improved mineral recovery rather than through modern requirements for environmental impact review, water pollution control, reclamation, habitat protection, and long term remediation. Federal mining policy after the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, the Clean Water Act, later hazardous waste legislation, and modern mine permitting developed a substantially different regulatory vocabulary, even as current arguments over critical minerals, domestic supply, national security, and dependence on foreign producers continue many of the resource questions visible here. Scattered staining and discoloration to several wrappers, with occasional library, government, corporate, and classification stamps or markings; contents generally sound. Overall good condition.

Item #23739

Price: $550.00