November 08, 2024

The Trump Administration Must Make Quantum Technology a Priority in the First 100 Days

By: Sam Howell

The world is at the brink of a quantum revolution, and America’s quantum technology lead is narrowing rapidly. The United Nations recently proclaimed 2025 as the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, predicting that quantum will be a “key cross-cutting scientific field of the 21st century” with “tremendous impact on critical social challenges.” Yet just when the global quantum ecosystem is nearing significant technical breakthroughs, the United States’ historic edge in the technology is diminishing.

Incoming President Donald Trump has a unique opportunity to reverse this trend and should act quickly in the first 100 days to reinvigorate America’s quantum competitiveness. Technology competition is a defining feature of today’s geopolitical landscape and the strategic competition between the United States and China. Quantum—a technology with extraordinary economic and military potential—is set to play an outsized role in determining which country prevails. China already outperforms the United States in quantum communications and is making rapid progress in other subsets of quantum technology as well. But there are critical steps that the incoming administration can still take to win the quantum race.

The United States’ long-standing supremacy in quantum technology—a bedrock of U.S. economic and national security—is in peril at an important inflection point.

Winning the Quantum Race

Quantum technology is an interdisciplinary field that combines quantum mechanics and information theory to produce new types of computers, sensors, and networks. The speed, precision, and functionality of quantum technologies far exceed that of classical technologies, which could help unlock transformative advancements across a range of industries. The far-reaching potential of quantum technology is what makes it so powerful—the countries with the best quantum technologies will also have the best pharmaceuticals, batteries, fertilizers, intelligence collection, and weapons systems. Quantum technology leadership enhances overall national competitiveness while lagging in quantum could mean falling behind in vital sectors, from energy to pharmaceuticals to material design and agriculture.

Given its prospective impact, quantum has become a key battleground in the technology competition between the United States and China. The first-mover benefits associated with quantum technologies are substantial. The first country to scale, commercialize, and integrate quantum will unlock a toolkit of capabilities—such as the ability to crack public key encryption or conduct complex surveillance operations—that non-quantum equipped adversaries will struggle to counter. The country leading in quantum also will possess science and engineering expertise that is extremely difficult to cultivate and could take competitors years to replicate.

Read the full article on Just Security.

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