leading to better implosion. The second was to make the shell much larger and thinner, forming a thin shell as opposed to an almost solid ball. These two changes dramatically increased implosion efficiency and thereby greatly lowered the required compression energy. Using these improvements, it was calculated that a driver of about 1 MJ would be needed, a five-fold reduction. Over the next two years, other theoretical advancements were proposed, notably Ray Kidder's development of an implosion system without a hohlraum, the so-called "direct drive" approach, and Stirling Colgate and Ron Zabawski's work on systems with as little as 1 μg of D-T fuel. The introduction of the laser in 1960 at Hughes Research Laboratories in California appeared to present a perfect driver mechanism. Starting in 1962, Livermore's director John S. Foster, Jr. and Edward Teller began a small ICF laser study. Even at this early stage the suitability of ICF for weapons research was well understood and was the primary reason for its funding. Over the next decade, LLNL made small experimental devices for basic laser-plasma interaction studies. Development begins In 1967 Kip Siegel started KMS Industries. In the early 1970s he formed KMS Fusion to begin development of a laser-based ICF system. This development led to considerable opposition from the weapons labs, including LLNL, who put forth a variety of reasons that KMS should not be allowed to develop ICF in public. This opposition was funnelled through the Atomic Energy Commission, which demanded funding. Adding to the background noise were rumours of an aggressive Soviet ICF program, new higher-powered CO2 and glass lasers, the electron beam driver concept, and the energy crisis which added impetus to many energy projects. In 1972 John Nuckolls wrote a paper introducing ICF and suggesting that testbed systems could be made to generate fusion with drivers in the kJ range, and high-gain systems with mJ drivers. In spite of limited resources and business problems, KMS Fusion successfully demonstrated IFC fusion on 1 May 1974. This success was soon followed by Siegel's death and the end of KMS Fusion a year later. By this point several weapons labs and universities had started their own programs, notably the solid-state lasers (Nd:glass lasers) at LLNL and the University of Rochester, and krypton fluoride excimer lasers systems at Los Alamos and the Naval Research Laboratory. "High-energy" ICF High-energy ICF experiments (multi-hundred joules per shot) began in the