A brief historic outline of NPL developments to date in the United States is given in Table 13.1. Clearly, parallel developments were achieved in Russia, and a history of these developments is discussed in previous chapters. Also, the history of early developments in the United States has been detailed in several review articles [1, 2, 10—13], so only the highlights of these earlier studies will be given on here before turning to more recent developments.

The first demonstration of an NPL was in 1974, when a y-ray-driven laser pumped by a thermonuclear explosion was reported [14, 15]. To distinguish the work focused on here from such experiments, some researchers have proposed the term reactor-pumped lasers (RPLs), but this discussion will continue to use the traditional NPL terminology. A similar concept using a fission reactor had been proposed as early as 1963 by Lloyd Herwig, who analyzed a CO2 laser approach [16, 17]. Despite attempts by several groups to demonstrate pumping of gases such as CO2, the first successful NPL was not achieved until 1975, when lasing of CO using a fast-burst reactor was reported at Sandia National Laboratories [7]. Since then, some 20 different experimental NPLs have been reported by groups at Sandia, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), NASA Langley Research Center, and the Universities of Illinois, Missouri, and Florida.