In December, physicists at Hefei’s University of Science and Technology of China published a paper in Science with huge national-security implications. They claimed, as the journal Nature put it, “to have made the first definitive demonstration of ‘quantum advantage’—exploiting the counter-intuitive workings of quantum mechanics to perform computations that would be prohibitively slow on classical computers.” It was a major advance in the global competition to develop powerful quantum-computing capabilities that could, among other things, enable adversaries to break encryption algorithms and potentially undermine the security of all data sent over the internet, from government communications to financial transactions.
How the next National Defense Strategy can get serious about emerging technologies
