After the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, we saw how federal investment in U.S. private industry and academic research allowed the United States to catch up, win the space race and hold decades of military and technology dominance. There is no doubt: America emerged victorious from the Cold War because of its investments in science and technology.
Today, the landscape of conflict is increasingly being driven by a new set of factors, which Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats summed up as a global “competition for technological superiority.” Yet our most advanced technologies are still largely based on Cold War-era inventions.
The development of quantum technology presents the United States with its new “Sputnik moment.” Quantum systems promise to upend everything that came before. But once again, America has some catching up to do.
A national strategy, like the one this nation embarked on following the Sputnik launch, will help get us there. And, yes, the stakes are just that high. If not higher.
The science is famously hard to grasp, but this is what’s important: Quantum tech takes advantage of quantum physics to manipulate atoms and subatomic particles in new, potentially powerful ways. For example, the speed and power of today’s computers are physically limited to the transistors that carry out their functions. That’s because transistors are basically on-off switches for the flow of electrons in computers (typically represented in values of zeros and ones, or “bits”).
But quantum computing promises a way around this limitation through the quirks of quantum physics. Specifically, the bits in quantum computers can exist in more than one state at a time, can influence each other instantaneously from great distances, and can act as particles and waves simultaneously. These new bits — known as quantum bits or “qubits” — create the potential to process data much faster than traditional computers.
This technology holds immense promise. It could allow us to communicate faster, more accurately and more securely than ever before — meeting not only the security challenges of tomorrow but also revolutionizing everything from code-breaking to cybersecurity to climate modeling, and opening new frontiers in medicine and materials science.
Whoever gets this technology first will also be able to cripple traditional defenses and power grids and manipulate the global economy. The surest way to deter such behavior is to win this race.
Yet, many suspect that China is already pulling ahead. Although the country’s total investment is unknown, the Chinese government is building a $10 billion, 4-million-square-foot National Laboratory for Quantum Information Sciences, due to open in two years.
To read more, click here.