Madam, - Since the late 1980s, the world has been aware of the aspirations of North Korea to develop nuclear weapons.
Contrary to urban myth, the construction of a nuclear bomb is not a weekend project for the avid enthusiast equipped with diagrams and helpful hints downloaded from the internet.
Such an endeavour involves scientific, industrial and logistical exercise on an enormous scale made all the more difficult by having to proceed in a clandestine fashion.
North Korea itself certainly did not possess all the necessary resources. So the question is: who supplied them and are any of these "facilitators" members of the UN Security Council whose prominent members differ so widely on how to respond to this menace? - Yours, etc,
Dr PAUL BALFE, Harolds Cross, Dublin 6W.
Madam, - The North Korean nuclear test calls for immediate action on behalf of all concerned parties. Happily, we have a precedent for how this is done.
A senior and respected public figure should go to the UN Security Council and tell a great many lies based on blurry photographs of rectangles in the sand. Then the US, as the commander-in-chief of all UN invasions, must form a coalition of the willing. This will include peace-loving nations which are entitled to test nuclear weapons, such as Pakistan, India, Israel, China and Britain.
They must all demonstrate their willingness to bomb the starving peasants and workers of Korea. Regrettably women and children will have to suffer collateral damage because, after all, how else would they know that their leaders had done wrong?
Thousands of young men and women from all over the world can then go to Korea in uniform to torture the locals and be tortured in turn by whichever one of the 50 resistance organisations, which will inevitably spring up, manages to capture them at roadblocks.
It may well prove necessary for the US to establish advance bases in Ireland for the speedy transmission of personnel and material but, of course, it won't be necessary for anyone in the Dáil to permit, discuss or even admit that such activity is taking place. In due course some Irish citizens will suffer some collateral damage at the hands of some international protest group or other.
On the other hand it just might be decided that, since the North Koreans already have The Bomb, it is too late for all that melarkey and we should just bow the knee and accord them the status and respect proper to a nuclear state. What price the Olympic Games in Pyongyang in 2016? - Yours, etc,
ARTHUR J. DEENY, Clyde Lane, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4.
Madam, - Now that everyone is jumping up and down about North Korea and its alleged bomb, could we address the issue of the large nuclear arsenal in Israel?
Forty years or so seems a bit leisurely, given the urgency being expressed in the North Korean case. Or perhaps it's just that we can't trust those inscrutable Asians, whereas a country which competes in the Eurovision song contest is one of us?
It's little wonder that the rest of the world can see the Western nuclear club (plus the Russians and Chinese) for the rank hypocrites that they are. - Yours, etc,
PIARAS MAC EINRI, Model Farm Road, Cork.