Martial mining: the links between global extractivism, the arms trade, and warfare

This article is part of our "Short Primer on Militarism and the Climate Crisis", which you can find in full here: https://wri-irg.org/en/story/2024/new-resource-short-primer-militarism-and-climate-crisis

What happens to our anti-war movements when we broaden our understanding of conflict to the extractive zones that make war possible? Can we throw more grains of sand into the machines of the military-industrial complex by beginning our analysis with the struggles of the communities whose lands and resources are exploited to materialise war?

The communities we work with at the London Mining Network—from the survivors of the Marikana massacres on South Africa’s platinum belt to the freedom fighters living under the Indonesian occupation of West Papua and its globally significant copper and gold Grasberg mine—know intimately that extractivism is a militarised process. It violently ruptures ecosystems, evicting then policing human communities who depend on the land for survival and subsistence. No community passively accepts forced removals and exclusions, the destruction of habitats, the contamination of rivers, groundwaters, and soils. However, this resistance is often met with repression, from surveillance and harassment to invasions and assassinations. Moreover, mining companies also apply counterinsurgency tactics like sponsoring football teams and building local health clinics, or even increasingly using environmental initiatives, to divide and conquer local communities. The Environmental Justice Atlas maps London’s mega-mining giants–including Glencore, Anglo American, Rio Tinto and BHP–as being involved in at least 83 conflicts surrounding their operations.

What we often overlook, however, is that militarism is also fundamentally an extractive process: it requires vast quantities of natural resources to innovate technologies of control, death and destruction. Travelling from mines to smelters before being assembled in factories, materials like aluminium, copper, platinum, and cobalt are transformed into solar panels and electric vehicles, as well as surveillance drones and nuclear weapons. Unsurprisingly, mining companies tend to emphasise their contributions to the former while concealing their indispensability to the latter. Arms companies, meanwhile, only admit limited knowledge of the volume of materials they consume. Yet the UK’s Ministry of Defence’s (MOD) next generation of hardware alone weighs at least 514,270 tonnes of raw materials. Scaling up the UK military’s resource consumption (which represents 2.5% of global military spending) would suggest a minimum demand of 20.6 million tonnes of minerals to re-equip the world’s armies this decade. Given the use of chemicals like cyanide and arsenic to separate metals from their ore, this inevitably creates billions of tonnes of toxic waste. When, in 2019, an iron-ore dam of mine tailings collapsed in Brumadinho in southeastern Brazil, submerging entire villages and killing 272 people, the description of mining operations as a warzone refused any sense of hyperbole.

Let’s focus on a few examples of these material militarities. The extraction of uranium has had world-historical impacts: Congolese mines in Shinkolobwe, then under Belgian colonial occupation, materialised the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while radioactive colonialism on Aboriginal lands in Australia provided the yellowcake for nuclear reactors in Fukushima. In fact, the UK’s nuclear arsenal—120 weapons with a stockpile of 215, costing at least £205 billion—would not have been possible without the Rossing mine in Namibia, occupied by apartheid South Africa and operated by a Rio Tinto-led cartel. Today, a consortium of arms corporations are assembling the largest submarines ever built for the Royal Navy, totalling 68,800 tonnes of material, 170 kilometres of pipes, 52,000 electrical items, 1,500 kilometres of cables and carrying up to sixteen Trident missiles, which share 48 warheads. The manufacture of a single nuclear bomb is estimated to produce 2,000 metric tonnes of uranium mining waste.

Composed of 300,000 parts by over 1,900 suppliers, what about Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jet, the most expensive weapons system in history? The UK is responsible for building approximately 15% of the 3,000 jets planned for production. This includes BAE Systems, which is contributing 30 separate titanium parts for the aircraft’s vertical tail fin. Familiar foe Rio Tinto operates one of the world’s largest ilmenite mines—used in titanium and as a pigment—for which more than 500 Malagasy villagers lost their land and livelihoods, while imperilling the drinking water of another 15,000 people with uranium and lead. Each F-35 is fitted for electronic warfare, accordingly requiring 417 kilograms rare earth elements. As essential ingredients for automated technologies, rare earth deposits—named more so due to China’s dominance in production rather than geological scarcity—are being courted by London-listed mining companies in coordination with the US Pentagon and British MOD. In June 2024, Israel bought another twenty-five F-35 fighter jets for $3 billion, bringing the fleet relentlessly dropping bombs on Gaza since October to seventy-five, and making it a critical weapon in the arsenal of a genocide.

The City of London is a global epicentre of organised violence that entangles mining with warfare across every continent. It is no accident that UK military bases—from Brunei to Belize, Oman to Kenya—trace the deposits being extracted by London’s mining giants and their shipping routes to production. When these industries rely on each other for survival, our movements against them must be equally interconnected. Every new aircraft, nuclear submarine, military base, and war is already a climate catastrophe writ large in the sacrifice zones of global extraction. It is incumbent on us to resist them together.

Find out more about The London Mining Network and their Martial Mining Report here: https://londonminingnetwork.org/project/martial-mining-2020/