100 YEARS OLD AND STILL NOTHING TO BE SNEEZED AT...

IHAVE been devoting a good deal of thought recently to the problem of North Korea. Its threat of sending a missile armed with a 100-kiloton hydrogen bomb in our direction is a bit of a worry but I think I have found a possible solution.

The breakthrough came when I was reading about sneezing and discovered that the energy of a single sneeze is roughly equivalent to 0.3 joule.

Compared with the 100 kilotons of Kim Jong-un’s hydrogen bomb, of course, 0.3 joules may not sound much. A kiloton of explosives is roughly 4,184 billion joules, so 100 kilotons is equal to 418,400 billion joules which is the equivalent of about 1,380,720 billion sneezes.

There are, however, around 7.5 billion people in the world, so if they all sneezed only once a day and we could store the energy of those sneezes, it would add up to 2,737.5 billion sneezes in a non-leap year.

But that figure, remember, is based on just one sneeze a day. We can quickly work out that if the human sneeze productivity is raised to an average of 504.4 per person per day, all our sneezes would produce an annual total of 1,380,795 billion sneezes which is greater than the sneeze equivalent of Kim’s 100 kiloton bomb.

Now 504.4 sneezes a day may sound excessive but when you work it out you will see that this is equal to only 21 sneezes an hour or little more than one sneeze every three minutes. (To be precise, it is one sneeze every 2mins 51.4secs but what’s a few seconds here or there when we are talking about nuclear armageddon?)

Of course, we may find it difficult getting the population of North Korea signing up to our sneezing project but it has only 25.37 million people which is less than 0.3 of one per cent of the world population, so their non-sneezing will hardly make any difference at all.

All we need to do therefore, is tell Kim, in no uncertain terms, that if he dares to threaten any of us with his 100-kiloton bomb, we shall all turn in his direction and sneeze every three minutes and within a year we will have wreaked as much vengeance on him as his bomb has devastated us.

Not only that, of course, but the side effects of our sneezing will be every bit as bad as the fallout from his bomb.

Just think of all the germs and bacteria-carrying droplets that are expelled in a sneeze and you will see the true horror that Project Sneeze can unleash.

It could create untold suffering in North Korea that would taken it generations to recover from.

I feel sure if all this is explained to Kim Jong-un, he will back down from his plans for developing and testing more nuclear weapons in the knowledge that the entire world’s combined Sneezes of Mass Infection could be far worse than anything North Korea might come up with.

We may, I suppose face resistance from the World Health Organisation to the implementation of this plan but the price is worth it. And it’s only a bit of sneezing after all.