(NewsMax) Professor Larry Bell, endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston, explains that quantum computing’s national security implications are “this century’s ‘moonshot’.” The race is about far more than national pride.
China’s 13th Five-Year Plan identified quantum computing as a key strategic initiative in 2016, and authorized a quantum “megaproject” to that end. China’s estimated tens of billions in quantum commitments far outpace Washington’s more modest outlays. By comparison the entire U.S. budget for quantum research in 2016 was just $200 million, or about one-fifth the cost of a single Chinese project in the field.
Quantum Computing Could Bring One Controlling Victor
Former Senior U.S. State Department Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program Adviser Morgan Wright compares China’s current development of a new $10 billion, 4 million square foot quantum computing park in the Anhui Province with Bletchley Park, home to Winston Churchill’s massive World War II “Ultra” program to intercept and decode information coming from previously unbreakable German “Enigma” machines.
Cybersecurity experts Richard Clarke and Robert Knake foresee in their book, “The Fifth Domain,” that quantum supremacy, should it occur, could ultimately have a single victor, one who frighteningly conquers and controls all artificial intelligence networks.
Quantum Computing is This Century’s ‘Moonshot’ in Sake of National Security
