The Die Is Cast

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-c- a Ib. and natural rubber, even at war-kited rates, only 20-c-. 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."

The real scandal was that nobody, before Pearl Harbor, had the combined foresight and strength of character to haul Jesse over the White House coals--and Jesse had forehandedly had his penny-pinching notions approved by the President. The U.S. was caught so short that somebody should have been impeached--but no one could put his finger on whom to impeach. Jesse Jones was rubber king by default, not by delegation of powers.

After Pearl Harbor all hell broke loose. Aside from a start on four "shadow plants," the U.S. had 25,000 tons a year of privately financed synthetic capacity (all specialty rubbers like neoprene). This was about the tonnage that Germany had when she entered the war in 1939, and it was pretty good for private industry, considering the cost, but for the U.S. at war it was rubber starvation. Congress and the people began to howl.

Jesse Jones, suddenly everyone's whipping boy, developed a stock answer to all rubber rows: he was going to build more & more, some time. In late December, it was to be 120,000 tons, in January it was 400,000, in March 600,000, then 800,000. By June it was to be 1,000,000 tons. Letters of intent from Jesse to the trade fluttered down like ticker tape at a pre-crash Wall Street parade.

Trouble was, the letters were all too often followed by "we didn't mean it" telegrams and they were all based on little or no decision as to process. The new plants--for butadiene, styrene and their combination into buna--were pushed around because too many cooks were stewing over how big the rubber program was to be.

Troubled citizens had no way of knowing that. All they knew was that Congress was going to "tear the lid off rubber"--and high time, too--but once the lid was off all they could see was a sheaf of alibis, and a "dreadful" corporation called Standard Oil. Jesse Jones said it wasn't his fault, he wasn't really in charge of rubber, ever; OPC Deputy Coordinator Ralph Davies said he wasn't either; Rubber Tsar Arthur Newhall (who took over this April) said very little, but everyone knew that his boss Don Nelson was still scrapping with the Army over the powers the President was supposed to have given him in the first place.

Meanwhile, almost as often as somebody told the public that the rubber shortage was terrible (despite Mr. Jones's grandiose plans), somebody else discovered another rubber source--guayule--dandelions --unpronounceable Polish and Russian weeds and inventors--new technological discoveries. Each "discovery" had some political wheelhorse to trundle it; each one had just enough "maybe" in it to scare Government rubbermen into another paralyzed pause.

One basic trouble is that butadiene can be produced in too many different ways: from the products of oil refining; from coke plants; from ethyl alcohol made either synthetically or out of such farm products as wheat, molasses, potatoes, etc. So synthetic rubber became still another battleground on which farm "chemurgy" proponents hurled their imprecations at the oil refiners.

The Oil v. Alcohol Argument (TIME, June 1) has obscured and delayed the buna program at its raw-materials base. It was raging hotter than ever last week when Leon Henderson's OPA (presumably hoping to pick up some much-needed Congressional good will) suddenly came out on the alcohol side. But it is now decided: for the 700,000 tons of buna for 1944, alcohol (from wheat or molasses) will contribute some 220,000 tons--about all the alcohol producers can spare from their commitments for explosives. Yet, even though the program is set, the arguments continue.

The soundest basis for the wheat-alcohol argument is that the U.S. has more wheat than it knows what to do with. Led by Iowa's Senator Guy M. Gillette, the farm bloc with all kinds of "expert" testimony to back it up, insists that its butadiene is cheaper than butadiene from petroleum products--which appears to be true only so long as the wheat is considered a commodity delivered free to the distillers' doorsteps. The farm bloc further contends that butadiene from alcohol is chemically a more direct process. This is true; several steps necessary to the petroleum process can be shortcut.

But petroleum-butadiene plants need around 300 tons of steel and 89 units of compressor horsepower per 1,000 tons of butadiene capacity; alcohol-butadiene plants need about the same amount of steel, 169 units of compressor horsepower, plus 27 tons of copper--the scarcest metal of all--v. almost no copper for oil. In the face of this ruckus, the final decision of the rubbermen is that there is no sense in building any new raw-material capacity (even if it could be built fast) as long as petroleum and alcohol between them can fill this bill.

But the wheat hullabaloo has nevertheless served a useful purpose: as the sights for the buna program were raised again & again after Pearl Harbor, they finally pointed so high that the capacity of the petroleum industry to produce suddenly became a question. The 220,000 tons of wheat-alcohol rubber will make up the difference at the same time that it helps overrule the farm bloc's conviction that big business has been blocking it out of the program.

Petroleum Technologies messed up the buna raw-materials program, too. The basic refinery raw material for butadiene is butylene, and butylene can be had either circuitously by extracting it from butane (natural gas) or directly, by skimming it off refinery gas. For the first five months after Pearl Harbor it looked as if the refineries couldn't skim off nearly enough butylene without at the same time losing out on their necessary production of high octane gas. That threw them back, willy-nilly, on butane, even though it takes much more steel and money.

Then Standard Oil (N.J.) stumbled on a new refinery trick (TIME, June 1) that released much more butylene with no corresponding loss in high octane gas, and a big piece of the program was shifted again.

But not all the buna program's troubles stemmed from such high considerations. Some plain old-fashioned competitive jealousies were also involved. The refiners had borne the brunt of butadiene research, were miffed because the rubber companies got buna from butadiene on. The chemical companies, scheduled to produce styrene, alcohol and alcohol-butadiene, didn't want to share secrets with the oil companies who had the original know-how. The little rubber companies were sore because they felt the Big Four of Rubber were hogging their end of the program.

There was no one in Washington with the strength and the savvy to end this caterwauling. By the very facts of petroleum technology, when a plant produces butylene it also produces high-octane gasoline and toluene. But there was no authority in Washington who would or could talk about these three strategic materials as one integrated production and financial problem. Butylene fell to Rubber Reserve Corp.; toluene (for TNT) to Army Ordnance; aviation gasoline to the Office of the Petroleum Coordinator. Something at last began to happen about six weeks ago. Its foundation was the sober recognition on everyone's part that 1) the rubber situation was so dire as to threaten the war effort itself; 2) the raw materials situation as a whole (particularly in steel) was so dire that the rubber program had to be frozen, and on a strictly string-saving basis at that.

Under these twin compulsions--and with a new anonymous team at the throttle --Arthur Newhall's office began to make some coordinated sense; the Army got so aroused it started giving some solid orders too; Jesse Jones worried himself into setting up weekly Monday morning meetings to iron out interdepartmental messes and jealousies. And the program at last got set technologically on the sound basis that, right or wrong, nothing--absolutely nothing--would change it again, except a new discovery that involved better production with no change in existing plant-construction plans and no increase in material needs. At long last, the whole huge program got off the drawing boards.

Best sample yet of this new go-ahead attitude came last week, when the newly tough rubber authorities turned down a new butadiene process that came from no less a petroleum technologist than catalytic-cracking expert Eugene Houdry. The rubbermen were still human enough to be glad to find an excuse in Mr. Houdry's steel figures, which appeared to be as high or higher than those for most of the program already under way. Mr. Houdry was mad enough to vent his spleen all over the place. But the important point is that, even six weeks ago a new process from a less eminent scientist than Eugene Houdry would have stopped the whole synthetic program in its tracks until it was investigated. Now the die is cast.

The Future is Still Clouded. Mass production of a complicated chemical product split into many component parts can produce all kinds of unexpected bugs. Though at least theoretically, raw materials and equipment are not as hideously short as rubber itself, any holdup there could wreck the program all over again.

But rubbermen had one last ace in the hole last week to bolster their hopes for obtaining 275,000 tons of synthetic in 1943: string-saving on the part of the oil companies themselves has turned up enough existing equipment to produce perhaps 100,000 precious tons of butadiene next year without any new capacity at all.

It was high time for good news of any kind about rubber: last week word leaked out that the U.S. has already used up one-third of its 700,000-ton stockpile of natural rubber.

* Despite the fact that no less a man than Henry Wallace this week wrote a New York Times feature story chronicling his fears as a free trader about the post-war pressure that synthetic rubber would put on Congress for a protective tariff.

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