Sovereign Quantum Capability Assessment: What Senior Officials Need to Know Before Committing to a National Programme
Facilitated assessment conversation for senior officials on sovereign quantum infrastructure, supply chain dependencies, and strategic gaps.
Event Details
- Who else is in the room
- Senior level executive peers, industry leaders, experts in risk, technology and business. Specifically: senior government officials, defence and intelligence professionals, and policy analysts who commission or conduct sovereign quantum capability assessments.
- Access
- Members only. Bundled with Expert Membership. Included with Expert Member tier
- Sponsor
- Organised by QSECDEF
- Facilitator
-
Anna Beata Kalisz Hedegaard Quantum Security Defence - Rules of engagement
- Chatham House Rule Chatham House Rule. Discussion is on the record; attribution is not. Participants may share what was said but not who said it.
- Format
- Roundtable Flexible between roundtable, structured Q&A or in-person hosted dinner
- Who Should Join
- This conversation is for senior government officials, defence and intelligence professionals, and senior policy analysts who commission or conduct sovereign quantum capability assessments. It is relevant to officials at national laboratories, strategic technology review bodies, and defence ministries with access to programme data. It is not for the commercial quantum sector or for researchers without a direct assessment mandate. Participants are expected to hold the institutional access and seniority required to apply what they learn.
About This Conversation
Why this matters now
Governments that assessed sovereign quantum capability under 2020-era assumptions need to rerun those assessments. Gidney's 2025 resource estimates for breaking RSA-2048 use approximately 897,864 physical qubits and a 4.96-day runtime. The March 2026 update to elliptic curve cryptography vulnerability estimates tightened the threshold further. A national programme scoped to defend against a 20-million-qubit CRQC faces a different problem from one scoped to defend against a sub-million-qubit adversary. Most sovereign capability assessments in circulation were written before the 2024 NIST standards finalisation and before the 2025 hardware estimates. The assessment baseline needs updating before any programme investment decision can be credible.
Outcomes
What you will leave with
- A comparative framework for structured sovereign capability assessment: the dimensions that matter (research infrastructure, manufacturing, talent, supply chain independence, institutional capacity) and the indicators that distinguish genuine capability from programme aspiration
- A facilitated peer exchange on where different national programmes sit against those dimensions, using a structured assessment methodology that can be carried back and applied within each participant's own institutional context
- Clarity on the supply chain dependency problem: how to identify which quantum technology components a national programme cannot yet source independently, and what the strategic exposure is in each dependency
- A shared read on the gaps between official programme narratives and what the assessment methodology actually reveals, drawn from peer experience across multiple national contexts
- Direct relationships with senior officials from other jurisdictions who have conducted or commissioned similar assessments and are willing to share methodology and findings under Chatham House Rule
Your Facilitator
Anna Beata Kalisz Hedegaard
Founder, QSECDEF
Anna Beata Kalisz Hedegaard has over 15 years of international experience in deep-tech, telecommunications, and defence communications networks. Her expertise spans intellectual property, advanced communications systems, and quantum secure communications. She has lived and worked across Poland, Denmark, the United States, Malaysia, the Netherlands, and Germany. Anna holds dual Master of Science degrees in Theoretical Cosmology from the University of Southern Denmark and Electrical Engineering from Wright State University, USA. She is the founder and board member of Quantum Security Defence.
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