South Korea sources 97.5% of its bromine from Israel, and bromine is the essential feedstock for semiconductor-grade hydrogen bromide gas used to etch transistors in every DRAM and NAND flash chip on earth. With Iranian ballistic missiles striking the Negev within 35km of ICL Group's Dead Sea extraction and conversion complex, a disruption to that single facility would immediately cascade across the global memory supply chain. Outside producers (Resonac, Air Liquide, Adeka) are already fully committed to TSMC, Samsung, and SMIC, with no spare capacity to absorb a shortfall. Samsung and SK hynix together control ~70% of DRAM and ~57% of high-bandwidth memory markets; a shortage would force allocation toward high-margin HBM for AI accelerators at the expense of commodity chips used in consumer devices and U.S. military guidance systems. Smartphone prices in Bangladesh, Nigeria, and South Africa have already risen 10–25% from existing memory inflation. Three policy levers are proposed: pre-positioning Arkansas bromine feedstock and forward contracts (buys months), building semiconductor-grade HBr conversion capacity outside Israel via the Chip 4 framework (takes years), and coordinated national actions by South Korea, the U.S., and Israel to designate bromine a critical mineral and fund diversified purification infrastructure.
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