Shockingly, decades-old export restrictions are like restraining orders, they stop nothing.
This has led China to surge forward in its nuclear weapons exploration. With at least a dozen orders for sophisticated US-designed and made computer chips in the last 30 months, they are making up for lost time quickly.
According to a Wall Street Journal review, a procurement document shows state-run China Academy of Engineering Physics (CAEP) has been obtaining semiconductors as designed, created, and made by the Intel Corporation and Nvidia Corporation since 2020. This is despite their inclusion on a US export blacklist back in 1997. The specific chips in question are most often seen in data centers and personal computers.
Originally purchased by resellers in China, the government got its hands on them quickly. Some were immediately put into computing systems, with CAEP studying computational fluid dynamics, this broad category often includes the modeling of nuclear explosions. This work is what landed them on the entity list to prevent such purchases going forward.
Done much like a straw purchase for firearms, their purchase from a reseller is an illegal process, but on the surface looks like a legitimate sale. Both parties are very familiar with the status of the transaction, and the legalities of it, but do it anyways.
For the resellers working with CAEP, they know just how crucial the US semiconductors are for them. With these chips being referenced in at least 34 different research papers within the last decade, the reliability of US technology is incredibly well-known and documented. From analyzing data to generating algorithms, their use has not only been well documented, but it has also become the cornerstone of it.
According to nuclear experts, in at least seven of the research papers they could use applications they created to maintain their nuclear stockpiles. With how easy this data can be to manipulate and how easily it is used, these chips were an insurance policy to get the Chinese nuclear program on the fast track to function, despite statements to the contrary that they may have made.
With China now trying to secretly buy our top tech, we have a lot at risk. As this video shows, it got too deep, too easily.
Learning Chinese have been easily obtaining this kind of technology is not surprising. It also undermines any attempts Biden is claiming to make about countering China’s attempts to use our technology for military applications. It’s impossible to counter China using our technology when they are using the latest and greatest pieces we have on the market today.
The blocking of chip sales is a big effort by the Biden administration, and October’s expansion of exportation regulations to block China from obtaining the latest and greatest chips has proven to be a failure. His attempts to sew things up on something we cannot accurately track or remotely disengage is a futile effort. With how crucial modern semiconductors are to modern warfare, there is little the US can do to prevent their use.
Given the crisscrossing of information, it’s incredible that Biden has been able to keep so much semiconductor business here in the US, but we still find China controlling most of the day-to-day chip production and the US economy being crippled by it.
