1940: 37,400,000 MT
2009: 19,000,000 MT
Which shows how pathetic things are, mostly due to outsourcing. We couldn't win a war of attrition.
I’m reminded of Mark Twain’s “Lies, damned lies, and statistics”.
I wonder if the chart from the CATO article is for “finished” steel and your table is for raw pig iron? (I have no idea on the various terminology!) And obviously if we have to import most of the raw material to build a “finished” product (rods, sheets, etc. of steel) we are screwed.
I was looking at the history of the A-bombs. In order to build the reactor at the Hanford Site they needed some huge amount of copper - which we didn’t have at the time.
So they used silver instead - from the U.S. Treasury. 16 tons or something huge. They were able to reclaim most of it, and in 1970 the last little bit was recovered and returned. They were able to recover something like 98% of it.