The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare

by Christian Brose

Another application is quantum communications, which seek to use the property of entanglement to secure information. The idea is that, because two entangled particles mirror one another’s behavior, and because external interference destroys the entanglement, particles could be used to build “unbreakable” encryption. An additional application is quantum computers, which use quantum particles to encode and process information. In classical computers, information takes a binary form. It is encoded either with ones or zeros. In quantum computers, because of superposition, quantum particles can also be encoded as both ones and zeros at the same time. It sounds preposterous, but it works, and it makes it possible to encode information in three units, not just two. This makes quantum computers exponentially faster and more powerful than classic computers and enables them to solve problems that are beyond the reach of even the best supercomputers. For example, traditional encryption is based on complex math problems that classical computers would take millions of years to solve. Quantum computers could solve those problems in minutes.