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This Defense Intelligence Reference Document, dated 30 March 2010, was prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense Warning Office under its Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program. It reviews quantum entanglement, nonlocality and EPR experiments, and asks whether nonlocal quantum effects could carry observer-to-observer signals faster than light. The paper describes proposed experiments and an example of real-time Earth control of a Mars rover. It concludes that there is no compelling answer yet and that experimental tests are needed.
From the source:Release of 2026-09-18 Incident: 3/30/10, Las Vegas, Nevada. Released with redactions. This document is a Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD), a technical reference format used by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to capture baseline knowledge on a specific topic for later analytic use. DIRDs are best understood as reference and synthesis products rather than as original research. It is one of 38 DIRDs produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) between 2009 and 2011. Because AAWSAP’s scope permitted a broad range of supporting topics, not every DIRD in the series directly concerns aerospace systems or future threat assessment. The following summary reflects the DIRD’s scope and framing at the time of writing and should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed. This DIRD reviews quantum entanglement and nonlocality with a focus on whether those phenomena might be usable as a means of faster-than-light communication between observers, especially for real-time space operations over interplanetary distances. The report surveys the relevant quantum experiments and no-signal theorems, then examines proposed communication schemes based mainly on momentum-entangled photons, including scenarios involving superluminal and retro-causal signaling. However, it repeatedly acknowledges that the central question remains unresolved experimentally, and it gives substantial attention to the coherence-versus-entanglement tradeoff and other features of standard quantum mechanics that may prevent usable signaling even if non-local correlations are experimentally validated. Overall, the document is an exploratory analysis of whether quantum nonlocality could conceivably support a practical communications application rather than a demonstration of prospective utility.
UNCLASSIFIED/ /FOR 8FFI@IAk WSE 8Hk¥ Figure 12. Schematic of Earth-to-Mars Real-Time Control of a Rover In order to avoid having to transmit two streams of entangled photons, the equivalent of the two fiber-optic links in Figure 10, at the base station the photons from one image slit would be polarized horizontally and those the other slit would be polarized vertically before transmission. Then, at the Earth control station, detection of the polarization of photons in the stream would constitute "particle" measurements, while separating, rotating to the same polarization state, and recombining the waves so that they could interfere before detection would constitute a "wave" measurement. In parallel with this nonlocal link, a conventional microwave or optical link would be used to communicate video images and other data to the Earth station. The video images and data would experience a propagation delay equal to the transmission distance divided by the speed of light, and would arrive at the Earth station seconds, minutes, or hours aher they were transmitted. The entangled photons would experience the same delay, but the nonlocal control signal would be sent backwards up the time stream, arriving at the probe at the instant the video signals and data were being transmitted, so that the nonlocal signal could steer and control the probe in real time, and an Earth - based operator could "drive" the rover on Mars using virtual-reality techniques. One can imagine driving the Mars Rover around the planet, actively steering around obstacles, activating analysis instruments in real time as interesting objects were found, and actively controlling repair equipment to deal with problems that arise. Such a communication loop (conventional + nonlocal) would be a light-like loop, with the two-way send and receive points located on the light cone. As such, it would not UNCLASSIFIED/ /F8R. 8FFIE!IJltt U:!I! eHt I 21
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Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 32 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.