Critical Materials Atlas
Decision layer · the buffer

The stockpile that mostly isn’t there

Half the atlas’s remedies end in the same word: stockpile. When a chokepoint can’t be out-built or substituted quickly, a strategic reserve is the bridge. So how big is the West’s buffer? For most critical materials, no country will tell you — only Japan (JOGMEC) publishes a per-material days-of-cover figure. The US holds materials (the NDS stores ~28 commodities) but not on a disclosed cover basis, and its dollar holdings are small: about 6% of its own identified shortfall. China holds more, in secret. The honest gap is transparency, not just tonnage.

An honest, data-thin page. Strategic-reserve holdings are the least transparent numbers in this field — China’s are secret, and even Western figures are patchy. So this does not compute a precise days-of-cover for all 32; it reports the public buffer, which is the gap. Figures web-verified from CRS, GAO, Columbia CGEP and JOGMEC; reproducible: build_stockpiles.py → stockpiles.json.

Who quantifies a buffer, and who doesn’t

The 32 materials, by published cover

Which of the atlas’s materials have a published per-material days-of-cover (Japan/JOGMEC), and which don’t — either held on an undisclosed basis (US NDS) or with no reserve at all.

Why this is the quiet decision

Every other lever the atlas measures — build an alternative supplier, substitute the material, recycle it — takes years. A stockpile is the only one that works on the timescale of an actual shock: it buys the months or years the others need. That is exactly why its absence matters. For the geological chokepoints (phosphate, the platinum-group metals, niobium) there is no faster option — you cannot out-build the rock — so the stockpile is not a backstop but the front line, and for most of them no country publishes how large a buffer it holds. Japan drew the right lesson from its 2010 rare-earth shock and built — and publishes — a 60-to-180-day buffer; the US holds ~28 commodities but its dollar inventory is small (~6% of its own identified shortfall) and it doesn’t disclose per-material cover; the EU has a plan and no reserve; and China, which holds the chokepoints, also holds an undisclosed reserve behind them. One honest qualifier: government reserves aren’t the only cushion — commercial inventories, scrap mobilisation and rationing all absorb part of a shock — but those are private and unplanned, and for the geological chokepoints there is no substitute for a deliberate public buffer. The cheapest insurance in the whole toolkit is the one almost nobody has bought. What else you can do →