Interesting plot. It would need to have multiple parallel plots where each nation with a nuclear arsenal thinks they are the only one that has lost their nuclear capability. Hijinks ensue as each tries to bluff the national actors.
Nuclear weapons are not very useful when you have good intelligence and a distributed ability to delivey vast amounts of precious-guided weapons.
I assume they are using renewable energy to reduce naturally-occurring iron oxide.
When the iron is burnt are they going to do with pure oxygen? Otherwise they'll get pollutants like nitrogen dioxide, possibly ozone. And the 0.5% not burnt will also become a pollutant unless carefully removed in some smokestack scrubber.
Or is this 'burning' to occur some kind of iron fuel cell? How would they liquidize the iron which is quite heavy?
Lastly, iron is heavy. Moving reduced iron could be expensive and dangerous.
Still, if sufficiently close to the renewable source this could provide much needed load leveling for intermittent sources.
If you target a niche in a large market then you are targeting a small market. Create serial MVPs targeting those niches until you find product-market fit.
Article alleges it is not external threats but corrupt political interests that drive ever higher US defense spending. But correlation is not causation and this link is unsupported, especially when no analysis of the un/reality of the external threat is offered. There is some low-hanging fruit here around Iraq so not bringing that in leads me to question the quality of this article. It is harder to make that case with the Cold War or the PRC vs its South China Sea neighbors so perhaps that is why this aspect of their argument was not pursued.