“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, and second time as farce.”
The Netherlands is both a technologically advanced and high-trust society; however, the country’s lax oversight of critical technologies has cost the world dearly.
In 2024, approximately 66% of the Dutch population reported trusting their fellow citizens, according to data from Statistics Netherlands (CBS).
Dutch people, as a cultural norm, not only trust their fellow citizens but also place high levels of trust in public institutions.
For instance, according to an OECD Survey, the Dutch place more trust in other people (77%), the police (76%), and courts and the judicial system (72%).
Furthermore, around half of the population reports high or moderately high trust in news media (54%), local government (54%), international organizations (52%), and the national civil service (52%).
At the same time, the Dutch leadership in innovation, R&D, filing patents, and the development of critical technologies is well established.
In the Global Innovation Index (GII) by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the Netherlands is placed 8th globally in 2024.
The country leads in semiconductor technology, particularly through ASML, the world’s sole producer of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, which are essential for advanced chip manufacturing that powers everything from AI to smartphones, electric cars, and modern weapons systems. This positions the Netherlands as a critical player in global high-tech supply chains.
However, this high-trust society, combined with advancements in critical technologies, has created a heady cocktail, making the Netherlands a prime target of industrial espionage.
In the 1970s, this heady cocktail resulted in the birth of Pakistan’s nuclear program. Islamabad, in turn, went on to sell nuclear secrets to myriad players, from North Korea to Iran, and even tried to smuggle nuclear secrets to Libya and Syria.
More than half a century later, Pakistan’s nukes remain a global concern. Islamabad often markets its bomb as an ‘Islamic Bomb,’ and Pakistan remains the only country globally that routinely threatens the world with a nuclear armageddon.
To be fair to the Netherlands, one might argue that a single leak or oversight in protecting a critical, high-risk technology is not reason enough to label a country as lax.
However, the Netherlands has done it again. Just that this time, it allegedly failed to protect a critical technology, despite ample warnings, intelligence reports on China’s nefarious designs, and safeguards in place to prevent leaks.
As Karl Marx warned us two centuries ago: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, and second time as farce.”
China’s ‘Manhattan Project’ To Level Western Lead In AI Chips
In the long-running China-US trade war, both countries had something that the other did not, and could not have in the near future.
China had a chokehold on processing rare-earth magnets, and the US had a near-monopoly on producing high-power semiconductor chips that power, among other things, the AI industry.
Due to this mutual interdependence, both Beijing and Washington have, for the moment, backed off from further intensifying the trade war.
However, behind closed doors, both countries are making spirited efforts to wean off this dependence and kick the other country completely out of their critical supply chains.
But, experts warned that both countries needed at least a decade, perhaps two, to overcome this dependence.
However, according to a new report, China has already made the technological leap, thanks to lax oversight by the Dutch semiconductor giant ASML.
In a high-security Shenzhen laboratory, Chinese scientists have built what Washington has spent years trying to prevent: a prototype of a machine capable of producing the cutting-edge semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence, smartphones, and weapons central to Western military dominance, Reuters reported.
The machine is an extreme ultraviolet lithography machine, or EUV, which sits at the heart of a new technological Cold War between the West and China.
“They use beams of extreme ultraviolet light to etch circuits thousands of times thinner than a human hair onto silicon wafers, currently a capability monopolized by the West. The smaller the circuits, the more powerful the chips.”
“Until now, only one company has mastered EUV technology: ASML, headquartered in Veldhoven, Netherlands. Its machines, which cost around US$250 million, are indispensable for manufacturing the most advanced chips designed by companies like Nvidia and AMD—and produced by chipmakers such as TSMC, Intel, and Samsung.”
U.S. Efforts To Protect The EUV Machines
ASML’s EUV systems are currently available to the U.S. and its allies, including Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan.
Starting in 2018, the United States began pressuring the Netherlands to block ASML from selling EUV systems to China. The restrictions expanded in 2022, when the Biden administration imposed sweeping export controls designed to cut off China’s access to advanced semiconductor technology.
No EUV system has ever been sold to a customer in China, ASML told Reuters.
The criticality of this technology is evident from the fact that export restrictions also banned the sale of older deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography machines to China, which produces less advanced chips.
However, the question is, how did China build the EUV prototype, despite such strict export restrictions?
Enter – China’s Project Manhattan
In 2019, one year after the US had placed export restrictions on semiconductor chip manufacturing technology, President Xi Jinping made making China self-sufficient in chip manufacturing a top priority.
Over the next six years, Beijing relentlessly targeted current and former ASML engineers. One particular target was the ASML engineers of Chinese ethnicity.
Recruits included Lin Nan, ASML’s former head of light-source technology, whose team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Shanghai Institute of Optics has filed eight EUV light-source patents in 18 months, according to patent filings.
The recruits were given fake identity cards.
China also sourced older ASML machines from ASML suppliers through secondhand markets.
Then China assembled a team of around 100 recent university graduates, apart from many former ASML engineers and scientists, to reverse-engineer components from both EUV and DUV lithography machines.
After many years of effort, they finally succeeded in building an EUV prototype in early 2025. The machine is currently in the testing phase. China aims to manufacture advanced chips with this machine by 2027.
The ASML veterans made the breakthrough in Shenzhen possible, sources said. Without their intimate knowledge of the technology, reverse-engineering the machines would have been nearly impossible.
What made China’s poaching of former ASML engineers easy was European privacy laws that limit ASML’s ability to track former employees. Though employees sign non-disclosure agreements, enforcing them across borders has proven difficult.
However, ASML had ample warnings that China was actively and aggressively poaching its engineers for their technical know-how of ASML’s EUV machines.
ASML won a US$845 million judgment in 2019 against a former Chinese engineer accused of stealing trade secrets.
Additionally, Dutch intelligence warned in an April report that China “used extensive espionage programmes in its attempts to obtain advanced technology and knowledge from Western countries,” including recruiting “Western scientists and employees of high-tech companies.”
Abdul Qadeer Khan, often referred to as the “father” of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb program, was a Pakistani nuclear physicist and metallurgist, employed at URENCO, a multinational consortium that operated a uranium enrichment facility in Almelo, Netherlands.
Khan’s theft of sensitive nuclear technology focused on uranium enrichment centrifuges from URENCO. This technology was crucial for separating uranium isotopes to produce weapons-grade material.
Khan reportedly removed sensitive URENCO documents, took them home, and copied them. By late 1975, URENCO became suspicious of Khan and assigned him to a less sensitive job. However, Khan soon fled to Pakistan with his family and stolen designs.
These designs helped Pakistan develop its nuclear bomb. In 1983, a Dutch court convicted Khan in absentia for espionage and sentenced him to four years in prison.
In 2004, Khan confessed to supplying nuclear secrets to North Korea, Iran, and Libya, running the world’s biggest nuclear proliferation racket.
North Korea is a nuclear power, and earlier this year, the US and Israel launched air strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. However, this vicious cycle started in a Dutch URENCO lab, where lax oversight led to the theft of sensitive nuclear technology.
It looks like fifty years after that tragedy, history is repeating itself; this time as a farce.
- Sumit Ahlawat has over a decade of experience in news media. He has worked with Press Trust of India, Times Now, Zee News, Economic Times, and Microsoft News. He holds a Master’s Degree in International Media and Modern History from the University of Sheffield, UK.
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- He can be reached at ahlawat.sumit85 (at) gmail.com
