🪨 The Most Dangerous Rock You’ve Never Heard Of (Iran Just Found 7,000 Tons of It.)

China Controls Most of It. And the West Needs It to Make Both Weapons and iPhones.

Updated and Revised: June 26th 2025

🪨 Antimony: The Boring Grey Metal That Might Just Start a War

What do bullets, batteries, and night vision goggles all have in common?
A little-known element called antimony — symbol Sb, from the Latin stibium, which basically means "stuff that burns, poisons, or hardens other stuff."

Once used as eyeliner in ancient Egypt (no joke), antimony is now a quiet but critical ingredient in everything from semiconductors to missile guidance systems, body armor, and lead-acid batteries. Which is to say: if you want a functioning modern military, or even just a working electric grid, you kind of need it.

📉 Why This Suddenly Matters

Until recently, nobody really cared about antimony. It was cheap, soft, toxic, and relatively obscure. Then, China weaponized it.

In August 2024, Beijing slapped export controls on six antimony-related products, including ore, metal, oxides, and even the technology for separating gold from antimony. By December 2024, it outright banned shipments to the U.S.

Their excuse? “National security.” The message? “Play nice, or freeze in the dark.”

It worked.

By early 2025:

• Global exports dropped 57% in one quarter.

• Prices quadrupled, hitting over $60,000/ton.

• Battery manufacturers panicked. Military suppliers scrambled.

• A grey market emerged, because of course it did.

If this feels familiar, it’s because this is the exact same strategy China used with rare earths, germanium, gallium, and now graphite. It's no longer just trade — it’s strategic leverage.

📍 Where Antimony Comes From

Right now, about 80% of the global supply comes from just three countries:

• China (55%)

• Russia (18%)

• Tajikistan (16%)

Let that sink in. The West — particularly the EU and U.S. — has no active antimony mines. None. Nada. Just recycling scrap and praying China doesn’t close the tap completely.

And fun twist: even if you find new antimony, building a mine takes a decade. Plus permits. Plus protests. Plus environmental lawsuits. You get the idea.

⚔️ Why the Military Cares (A Lot)

• Bullets and armor: Antimony hardens lead, making it perfect for munitions and tank armor (like the M1 Abrams).

• Primers and detonators: It’s key to explosives that actually go boom when you want them to.

• Night vision and infrared: Without antimony, those goggles and missile sensors don’t work.

• Flame retardants: Your military gear doesn’t melt because antimony trioxide is in the fabric.

In other words, it’s not just a “nice-to-have.” It’s a strategic necessity.

🌍 The Scramble for New Sources

Here’s where things get interesting:

• Iran found a major deposit (7,000 tons) in March 2025. It’s calling it a “technological lifeline.” The West is… not thrilled.

• Greenland struck gold — or rather, antimony — in November 2024. High-grade, big reserves. Cold, but geopolitically safer.

• The U.S. is investing in Perpetua Resources in Idaho — an old gold-antimony mine trying to reboot for the 21st century.

These discoveries could ease the bottleneck, eventually. But again, eventually is the problem. Mines don’t open overnight.

🤔 What This Really Means

Antimony isn’t just a chemical element anymore. It’s a symbol of a new world order — one where minerals matter more than missiles, and supply chains are the new battlegrounds.

It’s also a cautionary tale: if you don’t control the resources that power your industry, you don’t control your future.

Call it "resource realism." Or call it, as one analyst bluntly did, "geoeconomics with teeth."

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TL;DR — Why You Should Care

• Antimony is essential for defense, electronics, and batteries.

• China controls most of the supply — and is now using it as leverage.

• The West is scrambling to catch up, with new finds in Iran and Greenland.

• It's not just about one element. It's about whether nations can build things without begging rivals for the parts.

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🧩 Why Does This Matter?

Antimony is used to:

• Harden lead in bullets and explosives

• Build semiconductors and infrared sensors

• Create flame-retardants (ironically, also used in kids' pajamas)

• Stabilize solid-state batteries (goodbye, lithium fires)

• Push the edge in hypersonics and quantum computing

It’s a perfect Cold War 2.0 material. The stakes just escalated — quietly.

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🧠 Wait. Why Can’t We Just Recycle This Stuff?

We can. But we don’t. Because it’s not profitable. Antimony in consumer electronics or old batteries isn’t easy to extract. So instead of investing in circular systems, countries keep digging and hoarding.

It's cheaper to start another mine than to build a proper recycling ecosystem. Welcome to capitalism.

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🏭 Defense, Tech, and a New Supply Crisis

Let’s be blunt: if the U.S. or NATO can’t secure reliable antimony, the fallout goes far beyond weapons.

• Solid-state batteries? Delayed.

• Quantum computing? Choked.

• Missile systems? Bottlenecked.

And if Iran or China corners this part of the market, they don't even need to go to war. They just wait while you run out of the critical materials that make your tech work.

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🤔 So What Do We Do Now?

🔧 Short Term:

• Emergency stockpiles (already happening quietly)

• Bilateral resource pacts (expect sudden visits to African and Arctic countries)

🌱 Medium Term:

• Invest in alternative techs that use less rare inputs

• Build domestic refining capabilities (expensive, but possible)

♻️ Long Term:

• Get serious about recycling critical minerals

• Break the monopoly model before we rerun the 20th-century oil wars — but now over gray powder instead of black goo

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🧭 The Optimism Part (Yes, There’s a Sliver of It)

Antimony might just be the wake-up call. A gray, dusty, bureaucratic wake-up call. If the West — and by “West,” we mean governments, companies, and the public — can treat minerals as strategic instead of afterthoughts, we might actually build resilient, democratic, and green tech infrastructures.

Maybe we stop sleepwalking into dependency.

Maybe we stop outsourcing everything fragile.

Maybe we start treating minerals the way we treat oil — with foresight, policy, and actual planning.

It’s not sexy. But it’s survival.

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I don't know about you, but I appreciate the planet we inhabit. By paying attention to both human needs and the natural world, we can collectively build something better. This is, in fact, a choice, but we must all possess the agency to make it for ourselves. I'm not pressuring you; I'm merely planting seeds, hoping they take root and flourish.

//Peace

If you like to, Buy me a coffee

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Sources:

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   https://insidetelecom.com/iran-discovers-most-rare-minerals-in-the-world/

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