General Atomics began as a division of General Dynamics, created at a moment when the nuclear industry believed that civilian atomic power was the obvious future of energy. De Hoffmann assembled physicists, engineers, and dreamers and set them to work on reactor designs that were safer, smaller, and more versatile than anything the military programs had produced. The result was the TRIGA reactor — a design so inherently safe that it could be operated on university campuses and in hospitals, used for medical isotope production and research rather than weapons programs.

The Torrey Pines campus, dedicated in 1959, placed the company within easy reach of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the nascent UC San Diego campus, and the growing cluster of defense and research organizations that would eventually make the mesa one of the densest concentrations of scientific activity in California. The location was not an accident. De Hoffmann wanted General Atomics to operate at the intersection of academic research and applied engineering, and the geography of the Torrey Pines Mesa made that possible in ways that a more isolated facility could not.

General Atomics' most significant commercial products today have nothing to do with nuclear reactors. The company manufactures the MQ-1 Predator, the MQ-9 Reaper, and the MQ-20 Avenger — a family of remotely piloted aircraft that transformed the way the United States military conducts surveillance and strike operations. The Predator entered service in the mid-1990s and was flying combat missions over the Balkans before the decade ended. The Reaper, larger and more capable, became the platform of choice for counterterrorism operations across Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Somalia.

The scale of the company's drone business is significant. In 2020, General Atomics secured a $7.4 billion contract for MQ-9 aircraft and support services — a figure that reflects both the military's appetite for remotely piloted platforms and General Atomics' commanding position in that market. The company has sold its aircraft to the United States Air Force and Navy, to allied nations, and to intelligence agencies whose procurement processes are less publicly documented. From its mesa above La Jolla, General Atomics builds the machines that operate at the far edges of American power.

Alongside its drone production, General Atomics operates the DIII-D National Fusion Facility for the United States Department of Energy. The DIII-D tokamak — a donut-shaped magnetic confinement device — is the largest active tokamak in the United States and one of the most significant fusion research facilities in the world. Tokamaks work by heating plasma to temperatures exceeding those at the center of the sun, using powerful magnetic fields to contain the superheated material long enough for fusion reactions to occur. The physics are enormously complex, the engineering challenges are immense, and the potential reward — clean, effectively limitless energy from the fusion of hydrogen isotopes — justifies decades of investment.

That General Atomics operates both the DIII-D facility and one of the world's leading drone manufacturing programs reflects the unusual breadth of the company's ambitions. It is simultaneously working on the energy technology that might make fossil fuels obsolete and building the aircraft systems that project military force in the current world. Both programs descend, in their different ways, from the founding vision of 1955: that nuclear science and its descendants would define the future. The founders were right about that. They simply could not have anticipated what the future would actually look like.