“A Chinese company bought Magnequench,” “Not only did the jobs go to China, but so did the intellectual property and the technological know-how to make those magnets…. I’m not comfortable with the fact that we now have to buy magnets for our bombs from China,” said the exasperated Senator Hillary Clinton in a speech in Pittsburgh on April 14, 2008. Ten years later, in May 2018, the Department of Interior of the US Government published a list of 35 mineral commodities including the ‘rare earth elements group’ and classified them as “critical mineral”, as they were considered critical for the economic and national security of the United States.