Of NEO's and nukes

For the uninitiated NEO's are Near Earth Objects. The chief problem with them is sufficiently early detection. Like most cancers the earlier you detect them the easier they will be to stop or in this case divert.

What I'm talking about here is a last ditch defense. The only thing in the human arsenal that packs enough of a wallop to divert an NEO the size of the thing that reputedly took out the dinosaurs (depending on whether you wish to believe Gerta or Jan) that has gotten within 10k miles of impact is a nuclear weapon. The argument against such is that we'd just break it up into a few smaller one and that might even be worse. That argument is just a bit silly even if your intent is only to break it up it will depend upon how many pieces you break it. 3or 4 probably not much difference depending upon how much of a deflection that sledgehammer blow causes and how much it slows the things down. 3 or 4 hundred however and, well, last I checked the Pleiades meteor showers we experience every August have not exactly eneded civilization as we know it. But your real goal here is not so much to destroy it as to redirect somewhere away from us.

The other question would be how to make sure we don't anymore of the radiation from our own nuke than necessary. Which leads to another interesting question. Would it be possible to produce a shaped charge Nuke?

I think, from what I've read, the best thing to do with one of these objects is to literally attach some kind of propulsion device to it in order to cause it to DIVERT a few degrees.

In other words, don't slam on the brakes on the milk truck, just turn the steering wheel a little.

Works just fine if you catch it 150 t0 200k away much more [problematic the closer it gets.

if we had the technology, we could carve up a NEO with a giant grid of lasers.

Unfortunately wew don't though we appear to be getting closer. Unfortunately under Obama the sort of military application that might be useful for this is being killed since it is part of the strategic defense Initiative.