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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

> What did they threaten the Netherlands with, I wonder?

Explicitly? Probably nothing.

Implicitly? Nukes.

That's where the buck stops in geopolitics.

Ultimately, all international interaction is backed by implicit threat of war - and, for past couple decades, nukes are the trump card. The world is divided between the "haves", and the "have nots", and the "have nots" can't do anything if the "haves" put the nuclear option onto the table.

Of course, in polite company, nothing ever gets to that stage; the jobs of the leaders, diplomats, advisers, etc. is to keep everything low-key enough to not escalate beyond horse trading and strongly-worded letters. But everyone is acutely aware that the threat of violence is implicitly always there, and who can credibly threaten whom.

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Haha what a crackers comment. Threatening to nuke the Netherlands if ASML sells a lithography machine to China, what are you smoking. The Dutch would probably blow up the ASML factory and short the entire stock market the day before if that sabre was even rattled. Bye bye tech.

Nothing in society operates in a vacuum. The ASML/China issue doesn't exist in isolation. Obviously, there are plenty of levers to pull elsewhere in trade and policy, and many things more important to either side than the ASML issue.

As for the nukes, I invite you to imagine a hypothetical: what if Netherlands really, really wanted to sell a lithography machine to China, for whatever reason (say an ancient prophecy compelling them to), and the US really, really wanted for that not to happen (again, prophecy of something). Try to imagine how those negotiations would go - step through them, like you would a loop in the debugger, and tell me where you believe it stops.

It stops at whatever trip you’re on invoking nukes and ancient Dutch-Sino prophecies.

It stops way, way before that bullshit. Everyone involved in that negotiation only cares about it because they have some reason to want an even vaguely functional society to still exist, and the minute nukes are involved that's no longer a concern, for anyone. The nuclear taboo exists for a very good reason, and basically everyone (nuclear power or not) has extremely strong incentives to maintain it.

(to play one option forward, if the US actually is insane enough to threaten the netherlands with this, what do you think the dutch will play forward in their own game theory. One of the key aspects of nuke geopolitics is that nuclear powers cannot be allowed to get away with throwing that weight around, because there's no obvious termination point: the netherlands would instantly be very strongly incentivised to, if not develop their own nukes, align with China (or Russia, or probably more realistically, poke France) in return for a credible threat of retaliation. Congrats to the US, they've just scored an own goal)

"Nuclear Taboo" does not exist[0]. It never did, it never made sense. You can't rely on the belief that rulers and politicians operate on ethics and reject options based on how morally questionable they are. If they ever did, we wouldn't have wars, we wouldn't have war crimes, "collateral damage", "enemy combatants" = any male 12+; we wouldn't have low and high scale corruption, etc.

What exists is what I described above. Everyone knows war, up to and including nuclear, is always possible, but no one wants to go there. There is an obvious termination point: total nuclear war. It anchors everyone's expectations about how far they can push, who they can or cannot threaten with military action. People can run these hypotheticals quickly in their heads. Netherlands asking US, "so what you're gonna do, invade?", US saying "yes, and what then", and Netherlands... conceding, because they can't one-up. Compare: the only reason the war in Ukraine is still hot, is because Russia has nukes, and Ukraine doesn't, so there's only so much any of the allies can do to help[1]. If both countries had their own arsenal, or neither, this wouldn't happen.

So not "nuclear taboo", just an implicit understanding of MAD and where the buck stops, and how it affects who can threaten whom with military action, and recursively, how far anyone can push anyone else in political negotiations. It trickles down to the ASML/China question, too - even if they really wanted to have this deal, politicians in Netherlands know they have to concede to the US, because what else can they do?. They already run the "what if we X" / "then we Y" loop in their heads, hit the ceiling, and know they can trade horizontally, but can't escalate vertically beyond some point because of X, that's because of Y, that's because of Z, that's because of... nukes.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_taboo#Debate_over_the_...

[1] - And let's not forget that Putin threatened the world with nuclear retaliation if NATO helps Ukraine too much. There goes your taboo. Not that it existed, unless you forgot that some years ago, USA threatened the world with nuclear first-strike as a possible retaliation for cyber attacks.

it definitely doesn't end with nukes. the US totally has the power to shoot down the planes that the machines are transferred in if they wanted to.

the Netherlands (and most of the European countries) has the skills to build nukes and ICBM in 6 months if it wanted to. The tech is 80 years old at this point.

6 months?

> the Netherlands (and most of the European countries) has the skills to build nukes and ICBM in 6 months if it wanted to

Eh, probably not. The Dutch have a serious nuclear power economy [1]. But procuring and refining the uranium would take at least a year. Their larger strategic deficit in long-range missile production (or a civil launch industry).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_Netherlan...

The Netherlands already has a domestic uranium enrichment facility that can perform 5000 tons of separative work per year:

https://www.urenco.com/global-operations/urenco-nederland

Because of the counter-intuitive way uranium enrichment works, enrichment from natural uranium to commercial reactor fuel takes more separative work than going from commercial reactor fuel to bomb material:

https://scipython.com/blog/uranium-enrichment-and-the-separa...

Because commercial power reactors consume so much uranium per year, the on-site inventory needed just to produce a year's worth of commercial reactor fuel is enough to make many bomb cores. Nuclear breakout could be very fast if the Netherlands were willing to endure all the diplomatic consequences of withdrawing from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

I agree about the longer timeline to develop a ballistic missile system that could deliver a warhead.

EDIT: switched erroneous "less" to "more"

> enrichment from natural uranium to commercial reactor fuel takes less separative work than going from commercial reactor fuel to bomb material

More*.

(Also, fascinating. Thank you.)

Let me draw your attention to "Tacit Knowledge, Weapons Design, and the Uninvention of Nuclear Weapons" (1995)[0]. Basically, it takes a nation state 4 years to develop its first nuclear weapon, and no amount of explicit knowledge-sharing speeds up the process. The only thing that speeds up the process is sharing tacit knowledge by embedding a nuclear scientist who has already been through the process.

[0] https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD1018881.pdf

They'd more likely get sanctioned to death or invaded if they tried. Have you noticed what happens to "have nots" that try (or are accused of trying) to become the "haves" in the nuclear game?

Also, like 'JumpCrisscross notices, weapons themselves are but half of the equation - the other one is delivery. A few nukes and a trigger-happy dictator can get everyone to back away and indulge you some (see: North Korea), but to play at the big table, you need to have the capacity to deal a serious blow to another country (see: lesser nuclear powers) - but no one will let you get to that point. Nuclear-capable countries are not particularly keen on there being more of them.

> They'd more likely get sanctioned to death or invaded if they tried

Sanctions, maybe. Invaded, almost certainly not. If there is a consistent theme to American, Chinese and Russian foreign policy over the last 30 years, it's that there is a nuclear sovereignty respected above all.

If recent history proves anything, it's that nuclear sovereignty is the only form of actual sovereignty today. But what I'm saying is, the major players don't want anyone new to join the "nuclear club", so they'll stop those trying before they develop that capability.

Despite what 'Qiu_Zhanxuan wrote, you can't actually go from 0 to nuclear sovereignty in 6 months, and you definitely can't hide that you're doing it for long.

> you can't actually go from 0 to nuclear sovereignty in 6 months, and you definitely can't hide that you're doing it for long

No, but you can go from 0 to "possibly nuclear everyone yell about it," and stay there until you're actually nuclear.

Nobody will do anything about possibly nuclear. And nobody will do anything once you're nuclear. This was the critical hole in non-proliferation, and for a while it worked, because everyone pretended nuclear sovereignty wasn't a thing, but now that it is there is--and should be--a race to who are the regional powers, and who are subsurvient to them. The Netherlands have a history of being conquered and being rich. It makes sense for them to be a nuclear sovereign.

> This was the critical hole in non-proliferation, and for a while it worked

Fair, but I imagine everyone learned from that, too.

> The Netherlands have a history of being conquered and being rich. It makes sense for them to be a nuclear sovereign.

Arguably, it makes sense for every country to be one, if they could pull it off, but so far it seems they're sufficiently deterred from trying.

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