Technology

It’s not 90s tech though, especially for China.

Their latest x86 CPU is comparable to Kaby Lake in cycle speed which is only 8 years old, except it comes with more cores and supports DDR5 so it might as well be a first gen ryzen 7.

You're confusing process nodes and chip design, here. Chinese indigenous process tech is on a 90s level, or at least the most behind parts of it are (e.g. they may have good domestic sputterers but their lithography lacks behind). They're using off the shelf DUV for the bulk of their chip production, bought from Japan, the Netherlands, etc.

And they're good at DUV. Taiwanese and western producers switched over to EUV to achieve better nodes, China couldn't get at EUV machines and is squeezing the last nanometres out of DUV. Still not using domestic machines, though. Those DUV machines are what the Dutch are threatening right now.

No it isn’t, especially for weapons grade Uranium. Look at Iran, they’ve been perpetually “10% away from a bomb” for more than 20 years and still haven’t succeeded.

They probably either a) already have but aren't telling anyone or b) strategically kneecap the programme and use it as a political pressure tool. Like the deal they made, remember. Iran is practically uninvadable also without nukes and everybody knows it.

On the other side of the spectrum, both when it comes to "actually really, really wants to have nukes" and "barely past stone-age": North Korea did it already, the tech is bulky but also very well understood and comparatively primitive. Yes, more complicated than a washing machine, but nowhere close to chip making.

The only reason Pakistan succeeded

50 years ago.

It doesn’t matter that it’s DUV, they just want to ensure they make it harder for China to catch up, so even last gen tech is on the line because they believe it can be studied and reverse engineered.

The US don't have legal means to stop the Dutch doing DUV anything. They have for EUV because they developed that tech, but not DUV. Which means it would need to convince or strong-arm the Dutch government, which has larger implied political costs and would only make sense if they're also doing it with the Japanese. We'll see whether that happens.

imo it’s a stupid shortsighted policy, but it’s nothing new for the US pulling these types of moves.

They very much like to protect Intel, yes. The issue with Intel isn't their fabs or processes (the occasional hiccup nonwithstanding) it's their complacency in design. As a pure-play fab Intel would be neck-by-neck with TSMC.