NATO Runs a Quantum Summer School on Dual-Use Tech
NATO ran a summer school this year to train the next wave of quantum specialists, focusing on the defense angle. The NATO Science and Technology Organization’s 2026 program on dual-use quantum technologies mixed lab hardware work with policy sessions on governance and export controls. The quantum firm Qubitrium co-organized it and ran the hands-on tracks.
What the program covered
Indeed, the course, formally IST-TSI-244, was organized with the Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya, the NATO Communications and Information Agency, TU Delft, KIT, and the NATO STO. According to the August 3 report, it pulled together graduate students, early-career researchers, industry experts, and policymakers from NATO member and partner nations for a run of lectures, lab sessions, and policy workshops. Specifically, the topics tracked the strategic worries: entanglement distribution, quantum-internet infrastructure, sensing for civilian logistics and defense navigation, resilient quantum supply chains, and the ethics and export rules around dual-use technology.
Qubitrium, with Dr. Kadir Durak as an academic co-director, ran the experimental core, walking participants through real quantum hardware. The speaker lineup drew from named institutions with weight in the field, including SIPRI, DLR, evolutionQ, and Indra, which is part of what gives a company-co-organized summer school its credibility.
Why a training school is the story
That said, this is workforce-building, not so much a research result or a product, and Qubitrium is one co-organizer among several bigger names. The substance sits in the sponsor. NATO’s science arm putting on a quantum course covering both lab hardware and export policy is a signal of where alliance thinking has landed, that quantum is a strategic capability needing trained people and governance as much as better machines.
That fits a wider effort to build quantum talent, seen in programs like Xanadu’s engineer training with Lockheed Martin, and a defense establishment leaning into quantum, with military sensing money and work on jam-proof navigation. The programme’s own topics, quantum-internet infrastructure and resilient supply chains, are exactly where the technology and national security meet.