[laydn]

Sanctions by countries who developed a certain technology, appear to always result in the country which was sanctioned to develop that technology in some timeframe, depending on the complexity.

Was there any case of a "successful" sanction in history? Or is holding back a country for a few years (or decades depending on the tech) considered a success?

[giobox]

There are a fair few books ("Chip War") on this topic that make the case the US was relatively successful at keeping some critical advanced semi-conductor tech out of China and other less agreeable States for decades between the 70s and early 2000s. The commonly cited examples are America's "smart" weapons/bombs etc having a significant edge for a long time, see the ease with which US warplanes took out huge swaths of Iraqi infrastructure in Gulf War 1 in the early 90s, again largely thanks to superior precision weapons and stealth etc, which in many cases were the products of superior semi-conductor technologies.

"Chip War" to some extent makes the argument it's in the more recent times we've seen US legislators lack of maintaining as much interest in export controls that has lead to the erosion of this advantage, not that controls don't work at all per se.

The export controls work in some cases not because the facts or design of the tech is unknown; the issue is that many cutting edge technologies need an entire complex ecosystem of businesses, people, production and supply lines to be present to work too - it's often this part that becomes very hard to simply replicate - see Taiwan's huge lead in chip manufacturing despite being in a hugely politically unstable geographic location. It's taking the USA decades to try and bring that kind of manufacturing capability at the cutting edge back to the US, and the US still can't compete with the scale Taiwan can produce the latest chips at.

> https://a.co/d/guYgEsG

[eunos]

Chip war isn't written by a subject matter expert so I highly doubt the veracity of the content

[Goodroo]

I have a theory: If a country has an IQ of 95 or above, sanctions would likely prove ineffective in halting the acquisition of specific technologies within such a society.