The hard part of quantum is not the physics: it is building something that survives the real world

The physics is the part we understand. The hard part is everything after that.

Our research team is among the UK organisations exhibiting at this year's UK National Quantum Technologies Showcase in London. It is a good moment to set out why quantum is in the UK technology strategy we launched in September, and what we are doing about it.

When we launched the strategy, I said that investing in tomorrow's technology is just as important as the technology for today. Quantum is one of eight "tomorrow's technology" areas we are investing in, alongside trusted AI, secure communications, digital identity, modelling and simulation, advanced sensing, data fusion and cyber. The short answer to "why quantum" is that almost everything we build depends on three things it changes: knowing where and when you are, sensing what is around you, and keeping secrets.

I also said at our Tech Summit in September, where we launched the UK Technology Strategy, that frontier technology only matters if it can be trusted. Quantum is a good example of that, because it is not one technology on one timeline. It is a portfolio of technologies at different levels of readiness.

Quantum-safe cryptography is here now. The migration is already a programme of work for every operator of critical systems. Quantum sensing is leaving the laboratory; the engineering problem is now size, power and ruggedness rather than physics. Quantum computing advantage is real but narrow: specific problem classes, not general computing. Developing the core technologies is one part of the job. Applying them to customer missions and environments is the other, and in defence and national security that brings challenges of its own.

Knowing where you are when the satellite is gone

Two uses of quantum sensing matter most to our customers: navigation for autonomous naval platforms, and next-generation position, navigation and timing in space. They are the same problem from different ends: how a ship, an aircraft or an uncrewed system knows where it is when satellite signals are jammed, spoofed or denied. The UK's own quantum missions ask for quantum navigation systems, including clocks, on aircraft by 2030.

Thales has validated cold atom inertial navigation in the laboratory. The system has come down from 1,500 litres to 50, the target is 5 litres within three years, and the aim is to have it on aircraft in about a decade.

In the UK, we are working with quantum sensor providers to integrate new capabilities such as magnetic and gravity map-matching into UK products and solutions. Our focus is high-fidelity modelling at the physics level, particularly of cold atom inertial sensors, to understand the integration challenges and to accelerate early adoption by hybridising quantum and classical sensors. For an autonomous naval platform, that means knowing precisely where it is in any environment, independent of vulnerable external systems, through drift-free dead reckoning and position updates derived from sensing the Earth's own fields.

Better answers on real problems, and a clock that is already running

On computing, we published our first work after last year's showcase: Integrating the Quantum Advantage, from modelling to mission planning. It showed that quantum computing can be applied to real use cases such as mission planning, signal design and optimisation and how those problems scale for a quantum implementation. Some hardware providers now predict fault-tolerant machines from around 2030. We are preparing for that rather than waiting for it. The test we apply is simple: does the quantum method give a better answer, faster, on a problem a mission planner actually has? Where the answer is no, we say so.

On security, a cryptographically relevant quantum computer does not exist yet. But data encrypted today can be harvested now and decrypted later, so the migration cannot wait for the machine. The National Cyber Security Centre's published timeline asks organisations to complete discovery and planning by 2028, migrate high-priority systems by 2031 and finish by 2035. Thales is already shipping post-quantum products: the Luna post-quantum hardware security module launched this quarter, and a UK-hosted cloud HSM launched in September.

The depth of the Group, the breadth of the UK

Our UK team works with the depth of a Group that invests over 4 billion euros a year in research and development worldwide, customer-funded and self-funded. Quantum is one of the eight areas we invest in because we believe it will change what is possible. That matters because no single country programme can carry sensing, communications and computing at once. The UK gets the benefit of the whole, and contributes back as a conduit into one of the most joined-up quantum ecosystems in the world. That is also how the UK itself approaches it: building national quantum capability through international partnership, not in isolation.

None of this is done alone. We work across the UK quantum community: end users, the supply chain, the research hubs, and government bodies including Dstl, the National Quantum Computing Centre, the National Physical Laboratory, STFC and UKRI. We chair the Industrial Advisory Board of the UK Quantum Technology Hub in Quantum-Enabled Position, Navigation and Timing and sit on the industry partner board of the Quantum Navigators project. We sponsor PhDs in quantum sensing and PNT, photonics and quantum computing at the Universities of Southampton, Glasgow, Strathclyde, Birmingham and Oxford and at UCL. And we work with UK quantum sensor companies on problems that matter in service: shrinking a cold atom gyroscope, and building quantum sensing integrity into robust data fusion. This is what we and our partners including Dstl have called quantum systems engineering: treating integration, assurance and certification as the problem to solve, not an afterthought.

The UK's National Quantum Strategy set a ten-year, 2.5 billion pound programme and five missions with 2030 and 2035 dates. Industry's job is to turn the physics into equipment that survives a cold deck or a hot engine bay. That is what our part of the ecosystem is for.

At the Tech Summit I compared defence today with the IT sector in 1995, when power sat inside the mainframe and nobody saw the internet coming. The same kind of wave, this time software, autonomy and data, is about to break over ships, aircraft and vehicles. Quantum is part of what comes after it. The time to be ready for a technology is before it is obvious.

This year's showcase is where the UK quantum community takes stock: what has moved from the laboratory towards service, and what has not. Our team's answer to that question is the one set out here. Ask us the hard questions. The honest answers are the ones worth having.

In focus: the UK's quantum deadlines

By 2030: quantum navigation systems, including clocks, deployed on aircraft; mobile, networked quantum sensors giving new situational awareness across transport, telecoms, energy and defence infrastructure (UK quantum missions, November 2023).

By 2035: accessible, UK-based quantum computers capable of running a trillion operations; a quantum network deployed at scale (same source).

By 2035: migration to post-quantum cryptography complete, with discovery and planning by 2028 and high-priority systems migrated by 2031 (NCSC timeline, March 2025).