Quantum Scientists for Disarmament

First of all, thanks a lot to you and to all the people in your organisation for this very kind invitation and for the opportunity to collaborate in your struggle. Any opportunity to interact with different groups and sectors of society, especially students, is very welcome in these times.

I will keep the presentation of our group as brief as possible: I myself am a postdoctoral researcher in quantum information; I have recently moved to the Autonomous University of Barcelona, after working for a few years at the University of Helsinki. Quantum Scientists for Disarmament was born in the summer of 2025 during a three-week workshop on quantum information in Benasque, in the Spanish Pyrenees. There, several researchers from all over the world, but mostly based in Europe, had the opportunity to gather and discuss at a much slower pace than the usual hectic pace of academic research. During one session on science policy, we realised that many of us shared the same concerns about the ongoing militarisation of quantum research. We then continued the discussion, and a few of us (6 or 7) decided to start writing a "manifesto" to express our ideas and concerns. We looked for more signatures by sending our manifesto to some colleagues, and we kept working on the draft for a few months. In January 2026 we released the "Manifesto of Quantum Scientists for Disarmament" with an initial 50 signatures. We chose to publish the manifesto both on a dedicated webpage (https://disarmquantum.com/) and on arXiv (https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14282), a very common repository for "preprints" (that is, scientific papers that have not gone through peer review) in physics. We also started collecting more verified signatures from quantum researchers on the webpage, and we have now gathered around 400.

The manifesto is three pages long and discusses the current militarisation of academic research (and beyond) at a worldwide level. Without getting into the details, I can summarise the four main points it raises:

1. The rejection of the use of our research for any military purpose.
2. An invitation to open a debate within our community on the ethical consequences of military applications of our research.
3. The desire to create a forum where people who share our concerns can freely discuss and look for support.
4. Advocacy for the establishment of public databases at all public research institutions, listing all research projects funded by military bodies or defense agencies.

As you can imagine from this story, we cannot really call ourselves an organisation. We are rather a group of people who share similar concerns about a very specific topic. We have no structure whatsoever, but we are trying to keep the signatories connected and to stay in touch with other organisations around the world that can understand and support our struggle. I believe that, to date, we have been quite successful on points 2) and 3) of the manifesto. Point 4) is the most "confrontational", and on our own we currently have neither the power nor the capacity to push it forward. This is why we need to "ally" with other sectors of society.

I have to begin with a necessary clarification: everything I say in this interview is my personal opinion. As I explained before, we cannot really call ourselves an “organisation”, so I can tell our story, but I cannot speak as a representative of the whole group.

Going back to your question, this is indeed a very thorny one. The issue is that potentially any technology, even one developed with purely civilian goals in mind, can later be employed for military applications. Take, for instance, commercial drones, which are a striking example of this.

So, I myself prefer a more “historical” or “procedural” definition of “dual use”, which is different from the official one used, for instance, in EU regulations, where an item is considered dual-use if it can be employed for both civilian and military purposes. However, I am not a political scientist, so let me apologise in advance if I say things that are widely known without citing any source. Anyway, going back to the definition: what I wanted to say is that I prefer not to label a piece of technology as dual-use per se, because of what I said before: potential military applications are there for every technology. For me, what can be dual-use is the process through which a technology is developed, or the rationale behind a research programme designed to develop it.

Take, for instance, cryptography, which of course can be, and always has been, used for both civilian and military purposes. However, the process through which a new cryptographic protocol is developed can be very different depending on the involvement of defense agencies. If the protocol is developed through public and free research (free in the sense of without constraints of any kind, at least ideally), then the outcome will be publicly available to everyone, and it will not be biased towards the features that matter most for military applications. This is what happened in my field, at least at its origins, when "quantum cryptography" was born in the 80s and 90s. Nowadays, the knowledge behind these protocols is accessible to everyone in the world. If, instead, the protocol is developed in collaboration with defense agencies, we will find restrictions on publication, classification or export controls that benefit specific national governments, and possibly biases in how the protocol is structured that already encode the idea of using it in a military scenario, even if the research is done at a public institution. This is, for me, a classic example of dual use. In this sense, the open research that gave birth to quantum cryptography was not a dual-use process, even if militaries can now use its results, while a research program carried out together with defense agencies is. The example can then easily be extended to a whole research line or field.

Of course, this reasoning is biased by my perspective as a researcher and by what dual use means in my everyday work. I understand that, for the purpose of, say, regulating the trade of a specific item, labelling it as dual-use if that exact item can be used in a weapon anywhere in the world also makes a lot of sense.

Quantum science is based on quantum physics, a fundamental and well-established branch of physics developed in its present form in the 1920s and 1930s. To put it simply, quantum physics describes how very small particles like atoms, electrons, molecules and photons (which we refer to as “quantum particles”) behave and move. Indeed, it turns out that their behaviour is completely different from that of macroscopic objects such as a stone or a glass of water.

Many established technologies that we use in our daily lives, including transistors and lasers, are based on quantum physics. In recent decades, and especially in the past 15 years, research has increasingly focused on what we call “quantum technologies” and “quantum information”. Although, as I said, lasers and transistors can also be considered quantum technologies, nowadays we usually use this term for technologies based on controlling individual quantum systems, such as a single photon, while lasers are based on beams of huge numbers of photons, and transistors on flows of huge numbers of electrons. The key difference is that by controlling individual quantum systems (for technical reasons that we can leave aside here), we open up new possibilities for how we deal with information. Research on quantum technologies, which have mostly not yet reached the market, studies exactly this: how we can improve the way we encode and protect (“quantum cryptography”), acquire (“quantum sensing”), process (“quantum computing”) and transmit (“quantum communication”) information.

Virtually any quantum technology can be used for both civilian and military purposes. In this case, the connection is quite clear: exchanging, acquiring and processing information are vital components of modern warfare. In my opinion, realistic applications include quantum key distribution and quantum cryptographic networks for communication between military forces, quantum clocks and sensors for military navigation and positioning, quantum sensors mounted on drones, and, further in the future, quantum radars for satellite surveillance.

Several articles already discuss how quantum technologies can be of interest for “defense”, including a scientific review, an introduction for policy makers, and a white paper.

Of course, all these technologies also have very clear and useful civilian applications.

To be honest, the extent to which quantum technologies can improve artificial intelligence is far from clear. AI is already being used to improve quantum devices, but this is mostly a technical tool for researchers. So I would say that right now this is not a major point in the discussion about quantum technologies for defense applications.

I think the broad consensus today is that the most mature quantum technology from a military perspective is quantum sensing: in June of this year, the US Army announced that its scientists had demonstrated a quantum sensor that could dramatically improve battlefield signal detection. There is also ongoing research on quantum gravity sensors that could detect underground bunkers by measuring extremely small variations in density. As you can imagine, this research has a direct military drive.

That said, I believe these technologies are still mostly in the experimental phase. If they are actually being used on the battlefield today, they are most likely at the trial stage and do not yet make a crucial difference. This is because quantum devices are extremely fragile and sensitive to noise, and while some of them already outperform classical technology in the laboratory, which is a highly controlled environment where noise can be dramatically mitigated, achieving a real advantage in the field is still very hard.

It’s always very hard to make predictions. This is perhaps the most common question asked to quantum researchers: what will the near- and long-term future of quantum technologies look like? Every time I see an answer, it feels like listening to an ancient shaman making prophecies. Anyway, my opinion is that the only quantum technology that might become really important in warfare is quantum sensing. For all the other technologies, I don’t see any clearly disruptive application that could be achieved robustly in the reasonably near future. But anyway, who knows...

This is a very important question, and a point that is raised very often. To the best of my knowledge, there are currently two scientific articles on the policy and ethics of quantum technologies that explicitly discuss our manifesto (this and this). Both criticise our stance, more or less explicitly, and both rely in part on this argument: (quantum) technology has historically been driven, or at least funded, by military interests.

Well, this fact per se is largely true. It is undeniable, for instance, that several technologies were developed, or got a significant boost, during WWI and WWII. Perhaps not scientific theory as a whole, but certainly some branches of it were driven by war, and these in turn led to new fundamental results or to a better understanding of the theory itself: think of radio communications in WWI and the atomic bomb in WWII.

While this is true, we must also acknowledge that, in different contexts, technology has thrived without any involvement of military applications or funding. This is true for much of the technology developed in Europe after WWII, especially in countries where defense and research have long been kept quite separate. Consider, for example, the technological advances made after WWII in Germany or Italy in engineering, optics, mechanics, electronics, pharmaceuticals, chemistry, medicine, etc. Most of them were not a byproduct of military research.

So, the question remains: are military interests a fundamental component of technological innovation? Let me be a bit pedantic here. I believe that answering “yes” is yet another example of a social and historical construction being taken for a law of nature: yet another example of understanding the world while standing it on its head, as Marx would say. The truth is that, throughout human history, the military has been a key asset for governments and rulers who needed violence to impose their rule. So it is not surprising that they devoted a large share of their spending to it. Before WWI, the army and navy absorbed the vast majority of the German Reich’s budget. Today, defense is a small fraction of German public spending, because the state has grown enormously and shifted its spending towards social security, health, education and infrastructure. It is therefore natural that technology receives a boost from military interests when states are willing to invest enormous amounts of money in preparing for and waging war. But when states change this mentality, technology is also able to thrive thanks to a comparable economic effort, as in the example of post-war Europe I mentioned above.

So, boosting technology through military interests is a political and social choice, not a law of nature. The real paradox is that today governments are willing to spend a ridiculous amount of money, and even go into debt, to develop technology for war rather than technology for civilian applications.

It differs a lot, but military interests have infiltrated research almost everywhere. To give some “easy” examples, in the USA the Department of Defense alone accounts for more than half of all federal spending on research and development. In physics (including fundamental subfields), military funding of research is standard practice, and in some fields defense agencies are among the main funders. In my own field, quantum information, it is hard to find a paper from a US group that does not acknowledge funding from DARPA, the NSA, the Army Research Office, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, IARPA or other defense and intelligence agencies.

This is a subtle mechanism of control: if you want money, even for totally abstract research, you often have to ask the military agencies for it. Back in the late 60s and 70s, one of the demands of the campus student movements was precisely to end this practice, but this struggle was largely lost. So it is not surprising that we did not get many signatures from the USA, and that a good share of those we got are verified but anonymous.

India faces similar issues: its Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) is one of the largest public funders of research in the country, and it is increasingly involved in quantum technologies, for instance through a Centre of Excellence at IIT Delhi that has developed quantum key distribution systems for strategic use.

The problem also exists elsewhere in the Global South. For instance, in the manifesto we discuss the ethical dilemma that researchers in Brazil may face: it is sometimes much easier to obtain funding from US defense agencies, again even for pure research unrelated to any military application, than from their own federal government. This is a soft power tool, applied in a neocolonial way.

Unfortunately, we did not receive any signatures from researchers based in Russia or China, probably because openly confronting these governments on such issues is risky. As a result, we have little direct information about the situation there.

As for the “dual-use potential” of a technology in the long term, perhaps yes: if some institution or person, even in the distant future, decides to use a technology for military purposes, there is little one can do as a researcher. Of course, there are some technologies that we can hardly imagine on a battlefield, such as the vacuum cleaner. But even there, who knows whether some sick mind will one day come up with the idea of exploiting the suction mechanism of the vacuum cleaner in a military technology…

That said, it is certainly possible to carry out research through a process that is completely free from any “dual-use” bias. If there is no involvement of military agencies or funding, and the goal behind the research is not oriented towards this sector, then the technologies that come out of it will naturally have no bias towards military capabilities, and will be driven by civilian needs instead.

I will focus on research at public institutions, such as universities and public research centres, in the EU. Apart from the core funding that universities receive from their governments for permanent staff and basic infrastructure, and the large international facilities like CERN that are funded directly by member states, research is nowadays funded mostly through so-called “research grants”. We could open a whole new chapter on how we arrived at this funding scheme and how, again, it is definitely not a law of nature and has many issues, but that would go beyond our scope.

Anyway, to obtain a research grant, a researcher or a consortium of researchers has to apply for it, either to the national research council of the country where their institution is based, or at the European level. In the application, they must present a research project describing what they plan to do. In recent years, we have already observed a shift in the requirements for these projects, especially, I must say, at the European level: with the notable exception of the “ERC grant”, many calls require the project to have a clear and direct impact on society. This means that pure research is effectively getting less funding, which is shifted towards applied research. People doing pure research then have to claim some bullshit about the outcomes of their project, saying for instance that research on black holes will have an incredible impact on technology. Everybody knows this is a lie, both the applicants and the evaluators, but this is the toll that has to be paid to get these grants. Now, I don’t know exactly how we got here, but this was clearly a long-term political decision taken at the top levels of European (and sometimes national) research institutions.

The risk I fear now is yet another shift: from technological applications in the civilian field to a regime in which we will need to claim applications in the military field to get funding. This is not just speculation: the Commission’s draft regulation for the next European framework programme (2028–2034) no longer includes the “civilian clause” that has so far restricted EU research funding to non-military purposes, and explicitly allows support for dual-use projects. Exactly as we have shifted from fundamental to applied research through this process, we may then move to applied research for military applications. Of course, this is a statistical outcome: there are, and there will always be, people doing pure research, but it will become increasingly difficult, or less attractive.

I think we do not have to invent anything new. The examples are already there: large international research centres like CERN, the ICTP in Trieste (founded by Abdus Salam in 1964 to support scientists from developing countries), and large international collaborations are striking examples of how research can be rooted in solidarity and collaboration across borders. The goals of these research projects are not biased by national interests, but are shared by, potentially, the whole international research community. This means that researchers of every nationality meet there and build bonds that go exactly against the idea of clashes between nations, which caused so much devastation in the last century.

Unfortunately, even in these places this principle has recently been broken: after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, CERN ended its cooperation agreements with Russia and Belarus, cutting off hundreds of scientists affiliated with institutions in those countries. Such measures have the worst possible effect on the geopolitical situation, dividing societies even further and isolating dissident scientists, and initiatives like the Science4Peace Forum have directly opposed them. I think recovering the ideals behind the creation of these institutions is exactly what we need. CERN’s founding Convention states that the organisation “shall have no concern with work for military requirements”: this is exactly the principle we should defend and extend.

This observation lies at the root of a fairly old dilemma: is science neutral? Is technology neutral? I believe the clash between the neutrality and non-neutrality of science comes from a misunderstanding about the object we are talking about. If one considers a well-delimited scientific theory, or even more so a specific piece of technology, and abstracts it from its surroundings, treating it as an ahistorical object, then in some sense it is neutral in the way Einstein meant. Nuclear physics is an elegant and coherent body of knowledge that one can learn from scratch at university without ever thinking of the atomic bomb. The person who learns it may then apply it to cancer treatment, nuclear energy or atomic bombs, which are all based on the same abstract theory. Similarly, a laser as an individual piece of technology can be used to read a barcode or in a weapon, and once it has been created, its creator has little control over this.

However, the “non-neutrality” behind all this appears as soon as we consider the theory or the technology in its historical development. Nuclear physics would not have received such a boost without the race towards the atomic bomb and the post-war atomic era: although its key discoveries came earlier, the decades of massive funding and expansion that followed until the 1970s were driven by these issues and by the construction of nuclear reactors, and they shaped both the questions researchers addressed and the effort they put into them. The same goes for many other scientific theories, such as thermodynamics (driven by the industrial revolution and the steam engine), or the physics of information, from which quantum information later emerged (driven by the computing revolution from the 1960s and 70s onwards). So, even if the product of research may be regarded a posteriori as “neutral”, the research process itself never is. This idea is actually far from new (I believe that Gramsci was already saying something similar in his Prison Notebooks, almost a century ago), but somehow it is still not widely shared in the scientific community, mainly because of a misunderstanding, I believe.

Anyway, given that research is non-neutral in the way it is conducted, the task of each individual researcher, after acknowledging this, is to try to balance the external biases with the genuine curiosity-driven questions that arise “naturally” within the theory, and even more to try to steer these external biases in a positive and progressive direction. This cannot be the task of the researcher alone, though, because it depends heavily on the political direction of society as a whole.

There is one good thing about the “scientific knowledge” produced at public institutions: it is mostly free and open access, available to everyone in the world, and we hope it will stay this way in the future, although export controls on quantum technologies and the growing involvement of defense funding are already putting this at risk. This means that the use of this knowledge depends entirely on who decides to make use of it. The story is much more complex for the purpose of scientific knowledge, which can very often affect its later use. As I said before, this purpose is biased by funding bodies, which are run in a very opaque way. The impression is that they are driven by policy makers who are very difficult to reach, and by a restricted group of extremely “high-ranking” researchers who have every interest in perpetuating the current model, since they reached the top as its winners.

The wish would be to involve the whole population in understanding how science is directed and conducted, so that more democratic decisions could be taken on these topics. This is of course a tremendous challenge, as explaining the technical details of research and of each scientific topic is basically impossible. But citizens do not need to understand the technical details to decide what research should be for, so we should strive in this direction. Even more, the bodies that direct research and its funding are far from democratic. A more democratic structure should be implemented, even just to understand who takes the decisions in these bodies, which, even when formally public, are in practice inaccessible in a democratic sense and completely opaque.

I don’t think there is much I can add at the practical level. My wish is that researchers and universities would question more the points we have discussed, and be more aware of the biases and of the fact that there is no “natural law” behind the direction research takes. For universities, this could mean adopting civil clauses, as many German universities have done, and publishing which projects are funded by military bodies, as we ask in our manifesto. For politics, it means restoring the civilian character of European research funding and protecting curiosity-driven research.

Of course, at the personal level, we can choose who funds our research, refuse collaborations with military bodies, publish openly, and raise the issue collectively, as we tried to do with our manifesto. But the real goals are within reach only through political action, together with much broader sections of society. That is the only way to turn the tide.

As I said before, I will speak only for myself, as our group has very little structure and coordination. Together with some fellow signatories of the manifesto, I am now trying to bring the debate to new spaces. For instance, this October I am giving a seminar on precisely this topic at a research centre in Besançon, and in November I will organise a related debate at a winter school for physicists. I will also try to keep collaborating with groups such as yours, which have the power to carry forward real political struggles.

In the meantime, I also have to cope with my life as a precarious researcher, without knowing whether I will have a salary in two years. So I have to balance these activities with my scientific “production”, which, by the way, is yet another way in which the current organisation of research discourages debate and political discussion: these take time, may cost you links and collaborations, and slow down your publications in a “publish or perish” system, so the optimal choice is to avoid getting involved in them.

Anyway, even if the future may look pessimistic to us from a purely rational point of view, the collaborations and interactions with many people and organisations who share the same concerns and views give me the necessary optimism of the will to carry the struggle forward.