3. Inertial containment

In FCI, each explosion is induced by the rapid input of a large amount of energy, more precisely a power on the order of petawatts (10 ¹⁵ W) that only lasers can currently provide. CFI is therefore fundamentally an impulse system. It was around 1950 and in a classified setting at Los Alamos that Edward Teller laid the foundations for nuclear fusion as an energy source. In 1960, the laser was invented; its power increased rapidly via various triggering methods, enabling Basov and Krokhin in 1963 to publish their idea of using lasers to fuse a DT mixture. By illuminating deuterated targets with lasers, the first fusion neutrons were detected in 1968 by Basov et al. at the Lebedev Institute in Moscow (Russia) and Floux et al. at CEA/Limeil (France). Then, around 1972, John Nuckolls suggested the use of lasers to both compress to densities well...