Odd Lots · Monday, August 3, 2026
David Fickling details the unique properties of tungsten that make it vital for military use. Its extreme density and high melting point allow it to be used in armor-piercing projectiles that can penetrate tank armor, and in shrapnel for cluster munitions or drone warheads to maximize destructive impact.
“I mean, it's the same thing with the tungsten cube on your desk. It's incredibly dense. I think one of the things that attracts the crypto roose to tungsten is it's not just incredibly dense, it's about the same density as bold, but it also has this ridiculously high melting point but more than three thousand degrees celsius, so sort of three times hotter than lava, Tungsten will still be solid.”
“And that means that if you're trying to make projectiles with it. For instance, if you're trying to make an armor piercing projectile to get through the armor plating of a tank, it's going to hold its shape. Most materials are going to sort of turn into a mushroom and dissipate their force. This is going to go straight through to the inside of the tank, so that'll be very effective.”
“Or also a thing that's more current at the moment, say you're having a sort of cluster munition, a sort of a warhead that explodes into a sort of distributed charge so that you can take out a command post or a drone. With tungsten, you can have a bunch of very tiny tungsten pellets and they will make a sort of metal rain that will smash anything in the vicinity. And because it's so dense, it's going to be much more effective than steel. So for all these reasons, it's just very useful for military purposes.”