I was talking with my father (a retired Steel Worker) and my friend Eric about the effects of a Third World War on the US industrial base and discovered a very disturbing fact that might seal the fate of several older armored vehicles.
During the altered timeline in Twilight, the US had already decommissioned and sold off several steel mills to China and our domestic steel production had fallen to just 40% of our post WW2 production. With China under Soviet attack, steel in the US would become scarce (especially if the Pact naval strength were acting as "commerce raiders"). Additionally, the remaining mills were primarily "specialty mills" which used "preproccessed (scrap) steel" as a base for new steel. It takes a Blast Furnace or Bessemer Converter to make liquid metal for the production of new steel from only a mineral base. Most of our Blast Furnaces & Bessemer Converters were shipped to China (today we only have about 28% of our post WW2 capacity). We can still make new steel products using Electric Furnaces, Open Hearths, and Basic Oxygen Furnaces but these require scrap to make steel. These mills also tend to be smaller (due to their Specialty Steel origins). I think that most of the older armored vehicles (and probably the contents of every junk yard) would have been "sacrificed" in the production of "New War Materiel" along with a number of other materials in short supply (copper, lead, tin, nickle & petroleum come immediately to mind).
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