The story I like to tell is about the Manhattan Project. This caused a debate in US strategic circles that set policy for the entire post-1945 world. Debate included whether a preemptive nuclear strike on the USSR was necessary or even just a good idea.

Anyway, many in these circles thought the USSR would take 20 years to develop the bomb if they ever did. It took 4 years. The hydrogen bomb? The USA tested theirs in 1952. The USSR? 1953.

China now has decades of commitment to long-term projects, an interest in national security and creating an virtuous circle for various industries.

The US banned the export of EUV lithography machiens to China but (IMHO) they made a huge mistake by also banning the best chips. Why was this a mistake? Because it created a captive market for Chinese-made chips.

The Soviet atomic project was helped by espionage and ideology (ie some people believed in the communist project or simply thought it a bad idea that only the US had nuclear weapons). That's just not necessary today. You simply throw some money at a few key researchers and engineers who worked at ASML and you catch up to EUV real fast. I said a couple of years ago China would develop their own EUV processes because they don't want the US to have that control over them. It's a matter of national security. China seems to be 3-5 years away on conservative estimates.

More evidence of this is China not wanting to import NVidia chips despite the ban being lifted [1].

China has the same attitude to having its own launch capability. They've already started testing their own reusable rockets [2]. China has the industrial ecosystem to make everything that goes into a rocket, a captive market for Chinese launches (particularly the Chinese government and military) and the track record to pull this off.

And guess what? China can hire former SpaceX engineers too.

I predict in 5 years these comments doubting China's space ambitions will be instead "well of course that was going to happen".

[1]: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/china-want-buy-nvidi...

[2]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinas-explosive-...

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ciupicri 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> many in these circles thought the USSR would take 20 years to develop the bomb if they ever did. It took 4 years.

Because some people committed treason and gave the technology to the Soviets.

	▲	kelnos 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes, but how they got it is irrelevant. They got it, and that's what matters. China can (and does) do the same for current tech today, through whatever means. (Also, GP's comment directly said what you said; not sure what your comment adds to the discussion.)
	▲	adrian_b 19 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Because of the traitors, the Soviet Union has gained a few years, but the end result would have been the same. At that time, there were a few good Russian nuclear physicists, and they have also captured many German physicists and engineers. Actually I think that the effect of the information provided by the traitors was much less in reducing the time until the Soviet Union got the bomb than in reducing their expenses for achieving that. In the stories that appear in the press or in the lawsuits about industrial espionage the victims claim that their precious IP has been stolen. However that is seldom true, because the so-called IP isn't usually what is really precious. The most precious part of the know-how related to an industrial product is typically about the solutions that had been tried but had failed, before choosing the working solution. Normally any competent engineer when faced with the problem of how to make some product equivalent with that of a competitor, be it a nuclear bomb or anything else, can think about a dozen solutions that could be used to make such a thing. In most cases, the set of solutions imagined independently will include the actual solution used by the competitor. The problem is that it is not known which of the imagined solutions will work in reality and which will not work. Experimenting with all of them can cost a lot o f time and money. If industrial espionage determines which is the solution used by the competitor, the useful part is not knowing that solution, but knowing that there is no need to test the other solutions, saving thus a lot of time and money.
	▲	bluGill 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Some people will give it to china too. We have even caught a few (in other industries).
	▲	palmotea 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Because some people committed treason and gave the technology to the Soviets. American big business is pretty much doing that every day, handing over technology to increase China's manufacturing tech level. Pretty soon China won't need it anymore. If the massive incompetence of the US government and business establishment is defeated, the the industrial espionage will start to go in the other direction. More likely is the US just declines, becoming little more than a source of raw materials and agricultural products to fuel advanced Chinese industry.