This issue is published 75 years after the discovery of nuclear fission by Otto Hahn and colleagues in Berlin. It is also 60 years after US president Dwight Eisenhower's UN address later known as the 'Atoms for Peace' speech, which essentially started the international nuclear supply industry. (One small testament to this was that the first issue of Nuclear Engineering was launched 18 months later, in April 1956). In world history, the sequence was first fission, then the fission bomb. (A great history of the way that the US government applied these early scientific breakthroughs, and the scientists who produced them, is of course Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb). But from a point of view outside of the US, the UK, Canada and Russia, opportunities in nuclear research and civil nuclear power came after the threat of nuclear war. I would very much like to report that the civil nuclear industry that I see today has gone beyond its military past, and is now entirely peaceful. But that is simply not true. From basic atomic research programmes, to front-end fuel cycle (of course), through reactor vendors and the nuclear supply chain, the needs of 'defence' continue to underpin civil nuclear development.
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