Toshiba wasn't allowed to export a 9-axis (C)NC-machine to the Soviet union, because it could (and would) be used to create ultra-silent submarine props, in the 80s.
Asianometry video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaRyqAVIkwI
Also, the punishment would be not to the executives, but to the company involved (Toshiba) and imposed externally. However:
>In response to the affair, Toshiba carried out lobbying activities in Congress between 1987 and 1989 to ease the sanctions. The amount of money invested by Toshiba, the number of lobbyists, and the scale of its activities were said to be the largest ever.
So, business as usual.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government-business_relations_...
- the exact kind of goods that we will use the machine for
- certify that we will not use it in any nuclear explosive activity, or unsafeguarded nuclear fuel-cycle activity, or the use of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons
- that we won't transfer the manufactured goods or the machine outside of specific countries without the consent of some kind of swiss economic affairs office.
I got the same kind of vibes.
No idea if that's even possible.
The issue with nuclear weapons isn’t the weapon it’s the enrichment. The isotopic separation via centrifugal forces is the most efficient and technically challenging method of enrichment, and the hardware required involves extremely high RPMs and requires running them non stop round the clock in banks of hundreds of connected together so that the tiny fraction of a percentage each individual centrifuge can enrich the isotopes eventually ends up adding up to a significant enough to be useful for nuclear stuff.
As you can imagine building a 50 thousand RPM centrifuge to run 24/7 is quite challenging and involves a lot of high precision parts.