[en] I wish to draw the attention of the community to an emerging field of compound-nucleus reactions: The interaction of nuclei with pulsed laser beams with pulses of short duration (about 10^-19 s or less), high energy (several MeV per photon), high intensity (10³ or more photons per pulse), and with fully coherent photons. Experimental efforts are now under way to produce such pulsed laser beams. In the framework of ELI (the 'extreme light infrastructure'), an ultrastrong but otherwise conventional laser beam is planned to hit a diamond-like carbon foil of a few nanometer thickness, thereby accelerating a sheet of electrons from within the foil to relativistic velocities. Compton backscattering of a conventional second laser beam on that sheet produces pulses with the above-mentioned properties. Depending on photon energy and photon number, there are two scenarios for the interaction of nuclei with the resulting laser pulse. (i) The nuclear Giant Dipole Resonance is singly excited. (ii) Multiple absorption of photons produces a 'plasma' of nucleons distantly similar to that of a precompound reaction. The criteria for either scenario are discussed. Theoretical approaches to both scenarios and results that can eventually be compared with data, are presented. In case (i) the time dependence of neutron emission from the compound nucleus is non-exponential and leads to a novel test of random-matrix theory in nuclei. In case (ii) a fraction of dipole-excited nucleons is emitted directly without intermediate compound-nucleus formation. For the remainder, multiple dipole absorption leads to highly excited compound nuclei with comparatively small total spin. That offers the possibility to investigate the compound nucleus in domains of spin and excitation energy that are not readily accessible at present. It is expected that multiple dipole absorption saturates at an excitation energy near half the total binding energy. Subsequent multiple neutron decay is expected to populate a chain of nuclei with masses extending far off the line of stability into the proton-rich domain, offering the possibility to investigate such exotic nuclei spectroscopically