Tobias Ellwood is a Former Chair of the Defence Select Committee and a former Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office Minister.

In the late Thirties, authoritarianism was on the rise. Aggressive powers were rearming, forging alliances and exploiting a timid, risk-averse West, an isolationist America and international institutions powerless to contain aggression. And yet, for much of Britain, life went on. 

Today, the world is arguably even more precarious. Beyond the disturbing echoes of 1937, we face powerful non-state actors, a crowded multipolar world, persistent hybrid warfare and dramatic advances in technology lowering the threshold of hostile action. And over all this hangs climate change: a threat multiplier amplifying instability, migration and competition for resources. 

Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland provided a clear marker for the beginning of war in Europe; the atomic bomb an unmistakable punctuation to its end. Today, the boundaries between peace and war are increasingly blurred. There is no single front line, no single enemy and perhaps no single moment when we will be able to say conflict has begun. Instead, we are sliding towards persistent confrontation across multiple domains – military, economic, cyber, technological and informational – while the international order frays. 

And now another warning. Super AI. A senior Anthropic researcher warns he believes there is a greater than 10 per cent chance Super AI could wipe out humanity within a decade. Let’s hope we learn to tame it in time. But what if humans deliberately task AI to explore ever more efficient methods of lethality? 

Imagine AI lowering the barriers to developing biological weapons. Cyber-attacks of unprecedented scale and sophistication. Autonomous weapons operating at machine speed. Disinformation capable of overwhelming entire populations. The immediate danger may not be AI turning against humanity. It is humanity leveraging AI to harm humanity. 

Yet the constant drumbeat of crises and conflict is dangerously desensitising us, blurring the distinction between war and peace, eroding the accepted rules of state behaviour and, critically, masking just how rapidly warfare itself is changing. 

America strikes Iran. Russia rains missiles and drones on Kyiv. Cyber-attacks disrupt our economy. Assassinations take place on foreign soil. Disinformation seeps into our politics. Yet we digest each episode as another news event, seemingly oblivious to the direction of travel. 

In 1937, technological competition was already reshaping warfare. Radar was emerging, codebreaking advancing and aircraft transforming the reach of conflict. Today, technology is changing not only the weapons of war, but its speed, reach and lethality. 

AI can analyse vast quantities of intelligence, identify targets and compress the traditional “kill chain”, finding, identifying and striking a target, from hours towards minutes. 

The digital world has also become a domain of conflict in its own right. From thousands of miles away, data can be stolen, assembly lines hacked, and financial systems, energy networks and critical infrastructure incapacitated. The 2025 cyber-attack on Jaguar Land Rover demonstrated how digital disruption can inflict very real damage on the physical economy. And now add quantum. 

If AI is transforming warfare, quantum computing could transform the world. Medicine. Energy. Materials. Encryption. Communications. Navigation. Intelligence. The opportunities are extraordinary. So are the dangers. 

Our digital economy depends on encryption: mathematical locks protecting banking, commerce, communications, government and military secrets. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could break much of the public-key encryption we rely upon today. The point at which such a machine becomes capable of doing so has acquired an appropriately ominous name: Q-Day. 

There are echoes here of the wartime race to build the atomic bomb. The US-led Manhattan Project brought together the brightest minds from academia, industry and government to harness largely untested science, knowing whoever succeeded first could alter the strategic balance overnight. 

Today, the race to harness quantum could prove no less consequential. Yet this bewildering branch of physics – and its national security implications – remains poorly understood across much of Western politics. There is a dangerous complacency that our current technological superiority will somehow endure. China is making no such assumption. 

So when is Q-Day? Nobody knows. Quantum computers remain fiendishly difficult to engineer. Their fragile qubits must work together accurately and for long enough to complete extraordinarily complex calculations. But China is acutely aware of the prize. Intelligence agencies can collect encrypted information today that they cannot yet read, storing it for the day quantum makes decryption possible. Harvest now. Decrypt later. 

Governments are therefore replacing vulnerable encryption with new “post-quantum” methods. But Q-Day is only one part of a much bigger quantum revolution. Quantum communications could make eavesdropping detectable. Quantum sensing could allow aircraft, ships and submarines to navigate without GPS, potentially defeating jamming, while improving our ability to detect and track threats. 

In short: quantum computing changes what we can solve; communications how securely we can talk; sensing how accurately we can detect, track and navigate. China is pursuing all three. 

So, who is winning? America retains formidable strengths in quantum computing. China leads in quantum communications and is investing heavily across the field. But Beijing enjoys one advantage the West should not underestimate: strategic coherence – aligning government, academia, industry and vast state resources behind a national objective. The West has the stronger hand. But we are not yet playing it as one. 

Google, IBM, Microsoft, D-Wave and Quantinuum are pursuing different quantum technologies. Add British science, European engineering, Japanese expertise and American capital and the democratic world possesses a formidable ecosystem. But possessing the ingredients is not the same as having a recipe. 

The Manhattan Project succeeded because urgency overcame institutional boundaries. Quantum demands the same seriousness of purpose – this time through collective Western action. Imagine an authoritarian power able to read intelligence we believed secure while gaining an advantage in new medicines, materials, sensing and navigation. Then combine quantum with AI, autonomous weapons and cyber warfare. 

The balance of power could shift without a single shot being fired. Britain cannot win this race alone. Nor does it need to. 

We already have the alliances, institutions and scientific partnerships through which to act. Q-Day preparedness should be front and centre: migrating critical systems to quantum-resistant encryption, protecting supply chains and coordinating investment and research. It cannot become another international talking shop. 

The West has the science. The companies. The capital. The alliances. China has the strategy. That should worry us. In 1937, Britain could still pretend the gathering storm might pass. Two years later, reality intervened. 

Today the warning lights are flashing again. Except this time the battlefield stretches from seabed to space, from computer code to human biology, with AI and quantum accelerating the pace of change. We should not wait for our generation’s 1939 before rediscovering the urgency to act.