If China simply throws enough money at it.
The US maybe is able to prevent a Dutch company selling to China. But what if China goes "Hey mr. Dutch lithography specialist and mr. Taiwanese electrical engineer. Come work for us for couple of years and help us build this. Nice flat here in Shenzhen and plenty of money. Bring your family as well."
How can the US prevent that?
If you look at the next-generation lithography road maps, even in the early 90s EUV was just beyond the horizon, but it was on the road map. By 2014 more than twenty billion dollars were spent by various governments and private research when ASML began to ship these https://web.archive.org/web/20150920221539/http://www.asml.c... and even so it was another four years before the first actual devices using EUV CPUs shipped. And, let's not forget, the first device was the A12 Bionic for the iPhone XS/XS Max/XR and some iPads. In the fourth quarter of 2018 alone, Apple sold 46.89 million iPhones worldwide. And there were other companies jumping on the bandwagon but that's a lot of preorder money to help bootstrapping this.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/2162684/tai...
Taiwanese engineers lured to mainland China as chip makers go into overdrive
"More than 300 senior engineers from Taiwan have moved to mainland chip makers so far this year, joining nearly 1,000 others who have relocated since Beijing set up a US$22 billion fund to develop the chip industry in 2014"
Even with the "chokepoints" it is just a question of time and money, no? In particular now that China essentially is being forced to be self-sufficient.
The hardest thing about producing the atomic bomb itself, was to determine if it was actually possible. But once it was achieved, then everyone knew it was possible. So all you had to do was throw more time and money into cracking it. And a little espionage probably didn’t hurt too.
The 5nm EUV, while it sounds cutting edge today, may just need enough time, money, and focus to achieve it.
Someone already achieved it, so we know it is possible. And SMIC may go a different route to achieve the same result, thus giving China independent Intellectual Property rights to it.
EV is not that bad but yes, it's quite bad.
And the possibility was always known, the devil really is in the details.
If the hardest part was knowing nuclear weapons are possible then the world would be a giant glass parking lot by now.
This is true in the modern era. However it should be noted that the Manhattan Project did not use gas centrifuges to produce their enriched uranium. Centrifuges were apparently considered but ultimately gaseous diffusion was used. Gaseous diffusion requires larger facilities and more energy, but I suppose the process doesn't require such tight tolerances as modern highspeed centrifuges.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/chinas-air-force-bein...
Of course in reality it's much more complex, my point is that not everything can easily be resolved by "throwing enough money" at it...
Cheers.