In the high desert some 50 miles west of Idaho Falls, the terrain is so rugged that the vehicle in which your correspondent was touring the facilities at Idaho National Laboratory (inl) ended up with two shredded tyres. Originally set up in the 1940s to test naval artillery, the high-security government lab now worries about weapons of a different kind. Some of its elite engineers help protect power grids, tele-corns networks and other criticalinfra-structurein America against cyber-attacks and otherthreats. The lab boasts its own 61-mile (98km) electrical grid and seven substations. It also has a wireless network and an explosives test bed. These can all be used by government agencies and businesses to run experiments that would be hard orimpos-sibletoconductin an operationalsetting. "There are not many places in the world where you can crash a power system with-outincident," says Ron Fisher, who oversees the Department of Homeland Security's programme office at the lab.
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