What do you need to Achieve Nuclear Fusion?

A really huge laser . . . at least according to this Discovery News article.  The prospects of fusion (combining to atoms of an element to form an atom of another element) are theoretically quite big.  Fusion powers stars and it is thought that if we could learn to harness and control forms of fusion we could eventually produce cheap renewable energy.  I am very interested to see how this giant laser experiment works out.