Impossible to Close in an Open Global Market

The US continues to try (apparently not very successful) to completely cut off, or at least hold China back in terms of access to advanced microelectronics.

Especially to those integrated circuits that are used in the development of thermonuclear weapons and in their application. From time to time, it turns out that China has once again bypassed the obstacles erected by the American controlling Cerberus.

The new story was published by WSJ. As it turns out, China’s leading nuclear weapons research institute has bought at least a dozen state-of-the-art computer chips from the US over the past two and a half years, bypassing decades of US export restrictions.

The Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics (CAEP) has repeatedly succeeded since 2020 in obtaining semiconductors produced by US companies such as Intel Corp. and Nvidia Corp., despite the fact that back in 1997 this institution was blacklisted by the United States.

Founded in the late 1950s, CAEP is based in China’s western province of Sichuan and employs the country’s top nuclear weapons developers. Local physicists helped create the country’s first hydrogen bomb. The Academy conducts research in computer science, electrical engineering and other fields.

Recently, major nuclear powers, including China, have been hard at work developing inertial confinement fusion (ICF) technology, which involves the use of high-power lasers to generate fusion reactions.

This technology has both military and civilian energy applications. Intel processors and Nvidia graphics cards are used in research on fluid dynamics and explosion mechanics in the absence of real nuclear tests.

In December 2022, the US Department of Energy announced a breakthrough in fusion energy research using ICF technology at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California.

It turns out that parallel research in this area was conducted in China for at least 2-3 years, and American chips were used in software and hardware systems. In addition, Intel chips played a key role in the creation of the Chinese Tianhe-2 supercomputer and nuclear reactor control systems.