Rubber is soft, stretchy, and melts or ignites at a lower temperature than paper. Crystals crack under pressure and are notoriously fragile. Two hundred years ago, it would have been laughable to suggest that a war could depend on such substances; wars were fought with steel, coal, wood, and explosives. Nevertheless, rubber and crystals—specifically silicon crystals—have become central to the balance of international power in the past century. Rising tensions in the Pacific demand a closer look at these two materials. The role of rubber in World War II provides a perspective on how semiconductors may play into a conflict with China, and how the United States might strengthen its hand in such an event.
Natural Rubber
In the decade preceding the United States’ entry into World War II, much of the world’s oil and nearly all its rubber came from Southeast Asia: the American Philippines, British Malaya, French Indochina, and the Dutch East Indies. With the advent of the automobile and its pneumatic tires, rubber had become a key product in the world economy. Originally harvested in the jungles of Latin America, natural rubber is refined from the sap of the tropical rubber tree, Hevea brasiliensis. In the early 20th century, colonial plantations in Southeast Asia introduced a new level of production and efficiency, soon taking over much of the world’s production. Countries around the globe demanded more and more rubber. Japan, a rapidly growing industrial power, was no exception.
Without its own tropical colonies, Japan imported a majority of its rubber, critical for the growing auto industry, from the American Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, and British Malaya. Japan did not suffer from a lack of resources throughout its industrial history, at least until its invasion of China in 1931. In response to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the nations controlling the rubber plantation colonies restricted Japan’s access to natural rubber exports. The island nation was left without the means to supply its military in the enormous assault of the Chinese mainland it had begun. Within a decade, Japan had conquered the whole rubber-producing region of Southeast Asia while the Western rubber trade ground to a halt.
Synthetic Rubber
War with Japan quickly left the United States without access to most of its previous rubber supply. In an address to the nation in 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that “rubber is a problem for this reason—because modern wars cannot be won without rubber and because 92 percent of our normal supply of rubber has been cut off by the Japanese.” All that was left was a stockpile of 1 million tons to serve a peacetime consumption of 600,000 tons a year, a demand that would surely balloon in war. There was no commercially viable production method for synthetic rubber. The United States was entirely dependent on natural rubber, a critical resource that would be used up in a year. Without it, there could be no tires, engine belts, fuel tubing, gas masks, landing boats, or wire insulation.
In 1942, at Roosevelt’s urging, leading figures from the government, top universities, finance, and private industry united to form the Copolymer Research Committee, under whose aegis the ideas of more than 200 patents were shared, accelerating innovation. With the latest research at its disposal, the Committee agreed on a single recipe. Dozens of plants were constructed around the country. Within months, synthetic rubber was being produced at a rapidly growing commercial scale. By 1945, the United States was producing almost a million tons of synthetic rubber per year.
Semiconductors
In the present day, the focus has shifted from rubber to semiconductors. Similar to rubber in the 1940s, semiconductors are a key component of critical and emerging technologies in nearly every corner of the global economy. Everything runs on chips. Take away semiconductors, and most major technologies of the last half century cease to operate. Much like the relocation of rubber production from Latin America to Southeast Asia, semiconductor manufacturing has moved from the United States to Taiwan. This has concentrated 60 percent of the world’s integrated circuit components manufacturing in East Asia, with a significant portion in Taiwan.
Unlike natural rubber, semiconductors are a manufactured resource, making emergency production feasible. However, the current geopolitical landscape poses a significant threat to the global semiconductor supply chain. A Chinese strike on Taiwan could disrupt not only the nation’s export posture but also lead to major shifts in the world economy. In 1941 and 1942, Japan’s capture of the Southeast Asian colonies simultaneously deprived the Allies of rubber supplies and bolstered Japan’s own supply chain; a Chinese strike on Taiwan could achieve the same result. Not only would a blow struck to Taiwan cripple that nation’s export posture, but it would ignite major shifts in the world economy.
In response to these challenges, the Biden administration’s CHIPS and Science Act establishes the National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC) to foster collaboration between semiconductor manufacturers and suppliers. This is not a new idea, however. SEMATECH was established in the 1980s as a research-and-development partnership among the Department of Defense and several semiconductor manufacturers with the goal of boosting U.S. production. However, while SEMATECH has been an effective driver of innovation, U.S. manufacturers nevertheless moved most production overseas.
The NSTC should focus on streamlining domestic semiconductor manufacturing and laying the groundwork for an emergency production scheme. The CHIPS Act, with its incentives for industrial and educational investment in semiconductor manufacturing, lays the foundation for peacetime growth. However, a more rapid increase in production capacity is crucial for wartime scenarios. Drawing inspiration from the Copolymer Research Committee, the NSTC should establish a collaborative framework that in an emergency would hasten information sharing, patent pooling, and efficient allocation of federal capital to build and operate semiconductor factories. This wartime noncompetitive industry collaboration could serve as a critical asset in the event of a conflict, ensuring a unified approach to rapidly scaling up semiconductor production.
Looking Forward
Perhaps the greatest lesson from rubber production in World War II is that the impossible is possible. Only a failure of imagination will bind the future to Asian silicon-based semiconductors. Just as synthetic rubber was merely a concept without commercial viability when war broke in 1941, novel semiconductor technologies exist today. Organic technologies made with carbon-based materials have the potential to revolutionize the market. Graphene, a sheet of a single layer of carbon atoms, has recently been shown to have excellent semiconducting potential when layered on other materials. MIT researchers have shown that carbon nanotubes—microscopic tubes of carbon atoms—can be even more effective at semiconducting than silicon structures. The scientists who discovered quantum dots, another breakthrough in computing technology, even won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. While none of these technologies currently is used commercially to produce semiconductors, that may soon change. Carbon-based semiconducting technology promises easier and cheaper manufacturing and higher processing capabilities than silicon-based technology. The United States just needs to figure out how to build them into semiconductors commercially; luckily, there is a blueprint for how that might happen.
