Why has the UK handed the world’s new most powerful weapon to China?

Daily Mail

They call it ultracold quantum technology, and it will change the world. It’s a mind-boggling new field of science that is at once hugely exciting and – as we shall see – utterly alarming.

It will change everything we know about computing and ultimately render all devices currently in use obsolete.

As well as myriad practical applications that will change our lives, it is likely to transform warfare, with unhackable communications, precision weapons guidance systems, and radar so sensitive it will detect both enemy stealth bombers and distant submarines.

As Bill Phillips, Nobel Prize winning physicist, puts it: ‘A quantum computer is as different from a classical computer as a classical computer is from an abacus.’

It’s why any nation that possesses its secrets would be insane to share it with a potential foe – especially one that is hell-bent on dominating the globe, and has the resources to do it.

And yet that is precisely what Britain has done, despite pumping £1billion to the technological quantum drive since 2013.

To the horror of our politicians and security services, we have handed our world-beating advances into the technology to China, via our great seats of learning.

A laboratory at Oxford University – part-funded by the MoD via the top-secret institution based at Porton Down – has nurtured a crucial link with a Chinese military university and passed on our knowledge.

Beijing helped fund the Ultracold Quantum Matter lab through a university controlled by the Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army.

That college – the National University of Defence Technology in the city of Changsha – happens to be the main training provider for China’s spies.

Yet for five years, Oxford trained and nurtured a Chinese doctoral student who had graduated from another military university and was being funded by the NUDT.

He enjoyed access to the lab’s most advanced projects, and organised two ‘workshops’ in Oxford where his colleagues from China were briefed on the latest progress in this highly sensitive field of physics.

It’s a classic example of how China has for years subtly exploited the naivety of Western democracies to gain influence – and to steal and spy on our technology. Oxford sources insist their lab’s work was peaceful.

But senior Whitehall sources were deeply concerned because advances in quantum technology will always have a ‘dual use’, and be just as valuable to the military.

Now, the Daily Mail has learnt, Oxford’s link with the NUDT and China’s military has been severed – following an intervention ‘at the highest level’ by security officials, horrified at the damage that may have been done. This week, the case was discussed by ministers.

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