Britain Wargames a Crash Far Worse Than Covid If Chip Supplies Are Shut Off
It's 2027 and London's black market for vintage smartphones is thriving. Second-hand cars are selling faster than any rolling off UK assembly lines. Internet blackouts are common, inflation is surging and waiting lists for public health services are lengthening again. Britain is in the grip of a global semiconductor crisis.
In this hypothetical scenario, chip supplies dried up a year after China stormed Taiwan and blockaded production at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd., which makes 92% of the world's most advanced semiconductors. Broader tensions in the region disrupted supplies from other key producers in Japan and South Korea, and Beijing restricted its own exports for economic leverage against the US.
The spark for a fictitious tech shortage could also have been a tsunami big enough to knock out factories in Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. Such are the very real potential shocks envisaged in a war-game exercise the UK government will conduct to prepare for a chip shortage that people familiar with the plans claim would cause dire economic consequences.
The UK is preparing a contingency exercise across multiple government departments, Bloomberg has learned, and the pandemic offered a mere preview of the chaos that tiny silicon wafers can unleash. Since 2020, shortages were blamed for Honda Motor Co. closing its Swindon factory and contributing to flagship battery start-up Britishvolt Ltd.'s collapse, according to a new paper from Associate Professor Chun-Yi Lee at the University of Nottingham. MPs said the crunch slowed Britain's smart-energy meter rollout.
But the Covid dry-run was nothing compared with the catastrophe that would engulf the UK if the world's chip supply is cut off in its East Asian
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