The Erice International School of Fusion Reactor Techno logy held its 1981 course on - Unconventional Approaches to Fusion - in combination with the IAEA Technical Committee meeting on - Critical Analysis of Alternative Fusion Concepts -. The two events took place in the second half of March with an overlap of a few days only. The present proceedings include the first week's papers; those presented during the second week will be summarised in Nuclear Fusion. Right from the beginning of the course, and in particular In R. Carruthers' opening talk, it was clear that an uncon ventional approach...

The International School of Fusion Reactor Technology started its courses 15 years ago and since then has mantained a biennial pace. Generally, each course has developed the subject which was announced in advance at the closing of the previous course. The subject to which the present proceedings refer was chosen in violation of that rule so as to satisfy the recent and diffuse interest in cold fusion among the main European laboratories involved in controlled thermonuclear research (CTR). In the second half of 1986 we started to prepare a workshop aimed at assessing the state of the art and...