Your hypothetical question is very interesting to this history buff. The icon (WWII Patriotic Poster) - (no pun intended) that you mentioned is exactly what would happen again. The American public would rally and provide the metal needed in my opinion. In rural parts of the country farmers, ranchers, and others are stockpiling machinery and metal for several reasons including uncertainty about the future (economic or survival), historical value, present pricing, because it has always been part of the homestead, and the list can go on forever. The metal would come out of the woodwork. For those that do not spend much time in rural America it is hard to fathom the amount of machinery in shelter belts, gulley's, stockdams, abandoned buildings, personal dumps, etc. Think of the number of people that would become scrappers.
I think our problem would be time and processing it. Our environmental laws have reduced our ability to process it to almost nothing. This has made it economical for foreign countries to bring ships to our shores, load them with scrap, sail to international waters to process it, and then they return to our shores to sell us the finished product. Not all ships hauling scrap return it, but enough to make us dependent on this system. I can't believe the trade winds and ocean currents do not return the pollution back to us as well. It is my belief that we will have to build new plants in the middle of the country (vulnerability issues on the coasts which are the transportation hubs), build a better transportation system into the center of the country, and the demographics of the country will change as people migrate from the coasts. The real problem will not be obtaining metal, it will be the logistics.
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