The fundamental physical and technological problems of fabrication and testing, as well as new optics applications providing diffraction quality images (with spatial resolutions varying from tens of nanom eters to several nanometers) at wavelengths of 3-60 nm, are analyzed. This type of optical systems is required in the mass production of very large scale integrated circuits (ICs) (projection nanolithography), nanocerti fication (high resolution X ray microscopy), macrodiagnosis (extraterrestrial astronomy), and in fundamen tal investigations of the interaction between a material (vacuum) and superstrong electromagnetic fields (10 20 -10 23 W/cm 2 ). The current state of interaction studies around the world has been reviewed.