[phicoh]

The thing is, producing the right isotopes of uranium is mostly a linear process. It goes faster as you scale up of course, but each day a reactor produces a given amount. If you double the number of reactors you produce twice as much, etc.

There is no such equivalent for qubits or error correction. You can't say, we produce this much extra error correction per day so we will hit the target then and then.

There is also something weird in the graph in https://bas.westerbaan.name/notes/2026/04/02/factoring.html. That graph suggests that even with the best error correction in the graph, it is impossible to factor RSA-4 with less then 10^4 qubits. Which seems very odd. At the same time, Scott Aaronson wrote: "you actually can now factor 6- or 7-digit numbers with a QC". Which in the graph suggests that error rate must be very low already or quantum computers with an insane number of qubits exist.

Something doesn't add up here.

[FiloSottile]

We are stretching the metaphor thin, but surely the progress towards an atomic bomb was not measured only in uranium production, in the same way that the progress towards a QC is not measured only in construction time of the machine.

At the theory level, there were only theories, then a few breakthroughs, then some linear production time, then a big boom.

> Something doesn't add up here.

Please consider it might be your (and my) lack of expertise in the specific sub-field. (I do realize I am saying this on Hacker News.)

[vlovich123]

Not only, but a huge challenge was manufacturing enough fuel and was the real limiting part. They were working out hard science and engineering but more fuel definitely == bigger bomb in a very real way and it is quite linear because E=mc^2. And it was in many ways the bottleneck for the bombs - it literally guided how big they made the first bomb and the US manufactured enough for 3 - 1 test, 2 to drop

[Strilanc]

> That graph suggests that even with the best error correction in the graph, it is impossible to factor RSA-4 with less then 10^4 qubits. Which seems very odd.

It's because the plot is assuming the use of error correction even for the smallest cases. Error correction has minimum quantity and quality bars that you must clear in order for it to work at all, and most of the cost of breaking RSA4 is just clearing those bars. (You happen to be able to do RSA4 without error correction, as was done in 2001 [0], but it's kind of irrelevant because you need error correction to scale so results without it are on the wrong trendline. That's even more true for the annealing stuff Scott mentioned, which has absolutely no chance of scaling.)

You say you don't see the uranium piling up. Okay. Consider the historically reported lifetimes of classical bits stored using repetition codes on the UCSB->Google machines [1]. In 2014 the stored bit lived less than a second. In 2015 it lived less than a second. 2016? Less than a second. 2017? 2018? 2019? 2020? 2021? 2022? Yeah, less than a second. And this may not surprise you but yes, in 2023, it also lived less than a second. Then, in 2024... kaboom! It's living for hours [4].

You don't see the decreasing gate error rates [2]? The increasing capabilities [3]? The ever larger error correcting code demonstrations [4]? The front-loaded costs and exponential returns inherent to fault tolerance? TFA is absolutely correct: the time to start transitioning to PQC is now.

[0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/414883a

[1]: https://algassert.com/assets/2025-12-24-qec-foom/plot-half-l... (from https://algassert.com/post/2503 )

[2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.17286

[3]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09596-6

[4]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08449-y

[adgjlsfhk1]

You can already factor a 6 digit number with a QC, but not with an algorithm that scales polynomially. The graph linked is for optimized variants of Shor's algorithm.

[cyberax]

So today you have 1 gram. No bomb. Tomorrow you have 2 grams. Still no bomb.

...

365 days later, you have 365 grams after spending ungodly amounts of energy to separate isotopes. AND STILL NO BOMB! Not even a small one. These scientists are just some bullshit artists.

52kg later: BOOM!

[littlestymaar]

Not a very good analogy, because by the time you get 26 kg, I still have 71 years before you get the bomb.

[aragilar]

But you know beforehand how much you need. We can measure and make predictions with accuracy.