P.P.S.
Hmm - actually, if the object is that big...would we even have enough nukes/energy to break it up. Seems like either way (breakup/push) we're going to be limited by the amount of energy we can deliver compared to the mass of the asteroid? Oh! also, would a nuke actually keep stuff out gassing long enough before it cools back down? how long would you need to have that tiny lil push going on before it made any practical difference? thats a lot of mass to try and push ??
These aren't numbers, but a quick intuition reminder: nuclear-powered ablation drives are really good and we are really good at building them.
That's how you turn a fission bomb into a fusion bomb. If you just put LiD in a fission bomb, it doesn't squeeze hard enough. If you focus the x-rays from a fission bomb onto an ablation drive, it does squeeze hard enough and you 1000x+ the yield with fusion. Which is why fusion bombs look like metal peanuts.
Conveniently, this means we are also really good at designing x-ray reflectors and lenses that focus the primary output of a nuclear bomb for the purposes of building ablation drives. Depending on just how good, we could probably persuade an asteroid pusher to be far more unidirectional than one typically pictures from a "bomb," if we set it off some distance away and focused the x-rays in the direction of the asteroid.
Thanks! It actually appears it requires a lot LESS energy then I expected. According to [1] less then a tonne of TNT could accelerate 1 million tonnes to 0.1 m/s !! So it appears I was WAY off base (by at least 10^6 :-P). I swear I'm a better programmer then physicist!! :-D
