Documents / Official release
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 OFFI@IsT.tk WS& OPtklf paper attempts to address these questions by taking a close look at quantum entanglement, quantum nonlocality, the experiments that have explored them, and proposed experiments to test the causal and faster-than-light communication issues evoked by such physics. Quantum entanglement describes the condition of separated parts of the same quantum system in which each of the parts can be described only by referencing the state of other parts. This is one of the most counterintuitive aspects of quantum mechanics, because classically one would expect system parts out of "local" contact to be completely independent. Thus, entanglement represents a kind of quantum "connectedness" in which measurements on one isolated part of an entangled quantum system have nonclassical consequences for the outcome of measurements performed on the other (possibly very distant) part of the same system. This quantum connectedness acting in entangled quantum systems is called quantum nonlocality. Nonlocality was first highlighted by Albert ~instein and his coworkers Boris _fodolsky and Nathan ,Rosen in their famous EPR paper (Reference 4). They argued that the nonlocal connectedness of quantum systems was unphysical in that it implied a faster-than-light connection in apparent conflict with special relativity. Despite their objection, quantum nonlocality has now been demonstrated (see Section I) in many quantum systems (Reference 1, 2). In the physics community, it is now generally acknowledged to be implicit in the quantum formalism as applied to entangled systems, although there remain a few Copenhagen "holdouts" who would require an explicit demonstration of nonlocal signaling before admitting that nonlocality can be considered a real quantum phenomenon. The question investigated in this paper is whether quantum nonlocality is the private domain of nature or whether it can be used in experimental situations to send signals from one observer to another. As we will see, there is at present no compelling answer to this question. However, it is clear that if such nonlocal observer-to-observer communication were possible, it would have far-reaching implications. In particular, it would represent an enabling technology for superluminal (and retrocausal) signaling and communications, and perhaps make possible the real-time exploration of the universe. UNCLASSIFIED/ /rOR. 0rr1e11et U:!I! OHL I V
Not linked to a story yet.
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.