The tightest, grimmest war shortage facing the U.S. is rubber. It need not have been. For five months after Pearl Harbor the U.S. government did practically nothing effective to get a synthetic rubber industry created to fill the gap caused by Japan's conquests. That failure is the worst scandal of the U.S. war effort; the sort of scandal which, in another country, would have cost a couple of Ministers their jobs or perhaps have toppled a whole government. Only in the past eight weeks has a new team, with a passion for anonymity, arisen in Washington to take hold of the synthetic-rubber program and push it through, come hell or high water. Only now are there some grounds for honest optimism.
Barring acts of God, the U.S. is scheduled to produce in 1943 between 275,000 and 325,000 tons of synthetic rubber-starvation rations. More important, it will have at 1943's end the capacity to produce 800,000 tons in 1944—which begins to approach the United Nations' essential needs. (The civil consumer is out until 1945, at best.) Of that 800,000 tons, 100,000 will be specialty rubbers; 60,000, Standard Oil's famed butyl; 40,000, Du Font's long-established neoprene—strategic for self-sealing gas tanks, oil-resistant hose lines, etc. The rest will be what chemists designate as Buna-S, which has recently given road-test performances up to 130-160% of the best wearing qualities of natural rubber. The emergence of Buna-S almost unquestionably means that natural rubber will be a deader commodity at the end of this war than natural nitrates were at the end of the last.* The estimated cost of the Buna program now ($500 per ton of plant capacity) is only half what it was five months ago, and oilmen confidently believe that, by the end of the war, costs (combined with quality) will meet and lick natural rubber.
Buna-S, conceived long ago, has had a most painful birth. It is produced by uniting, through heat, pressure and catalysts, two chemicals, butadiene (bewta-die'een) (75%) and styrene (25%). Styrene is not a basic problem; Dow Chemical and Monsanto should be adequately big factors in producing it. The bloody salient of the synthetic-rubber battle has been butadiene which, except for synthetic rubber, has so far no other reason for existence. Once the plants are created and producing, the problem again becomes simple; the rubber companies in their existing plants take the combined ("co-polymerized") butadiene-styrene product, use it like natural rubber.
Why were the butadiene plants and the polymerizing plants not built?
Before Pearl Harbor synthetic rubber was regarded as the average man regards his life insurance: protection against the unthinkable. NDAC's Ed Stettinius pleaded for 100,000 tons of insurance. But to Jesse Jones the rates seemed too high. They obviously were too high for large-scale private investment so long as Buna-S cost 25-35¢ a Ib. and natural rubber, even at war-kited rates, only 20¢. In May 1941, the same day that his RFC head. Emil Schram, told Congress "I think we will have to start rationing rubber very soon," Jesse himself said: "Unless we are cut off from the Far East [synthetic rubber] would be a great waste of money."