100%, but smoke screen is over selling it. From the article
> The project is being carried out in collaboration with Transport for London, QinetiQ, PA Consulting, Imperial College London and University of Sussex.
QinetiQ is a UK weapons developer, probably the UKs largest. So the defence angle isn’t really being hidden.
Older articles on this project from elsewhere outline the defence angle even more explicitly:
But IanVisits is a transport focused blog, so the article has a transport focus, rather than a defence focus.
As to why any of this is happening on the underground, that’s pretty simple. Tube trains are a good real world test bed for this technology. Shove your quantum box on an existing train, drive it through the existing tunnels a few times as part of a normal tube service. Compare the run result and validate how accurate your technology is.
It’s a lot cheaper than putting it on a boat or a submarine. Not to mention Imperial College London is based in… London. They’re literally a five minute walk from a tube station.
Yes this is weapons technologies. Many targets are fixed (on the earth). If you can fly by wire jamming technology is useless. This was solved for strategic weapons 40 years ago at great cost.
The real problem is weapons often have power and weight limitations that don't apply to trains. So you can build large, power hungry prototypes and test them on a train. Once you work out the bugs found there you then start the miniaturization and lower power versions for where you really want it (or save a lot of money by not doing that work for something that you know can't work anyway)
Which then leads me to think the whole thing is a smoke screen, not sure why