AAWSAP DIRD, The Space Communication Implications of Quantum Entanglement and Nonlocality, March 2010

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.

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However, emerging from work on quantum gravity offers the possibility of an explicitly
nonlinear form of quantum mechanics that reduces to linear quantum mechanics in the
limiting case of weak or no gravity. Using the wave picture, it is possible to formulate a
Laplace-Beltrami wave equation for gravitationally curved space. The Laplace-Beltrami
operator on the left-hand side contains information about the space-time geometry (the
metric te nsor) and operates on the wave function. On the right-hand side is the same
term found in the flat space Klein-Gordon wave equation. In flat space (no gravity), this
"curved-space" wave equation reduces to the Klein-Gordon wave equation, but in
curved space it is nonlinear in a way that could facilitate nonlocal communication. Thus,
in an environment where strong space curvature is expected-for example, the vicinity
of a neutron star or black hole-sufficient quantum nonlinearity may exist to facilitate
nonlocal communication .
XIII. Conclusion
Ultimately, the question of whether nonlocal communication is possible is an
experimental one. The issue should be resolvable by testing for nonlocal communication
and observing what experimental lim its appear. In particular, are the limits of
coherence/entanglement complementarity so severe as to preclude signaling? Currently
at least one experiment in progress aims to produce a coincidence-free version of the
Ghost Interference experiment. We await the outcome of such tests.
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