Meteor Strikes Russia

[niky]

naaaah! sorry niky, disagree. the americans, british, french, russians and chinese detonated hundreds of nuclear warheads during the cold war in the air, land and sea, from small 3KT cannon fired shells to hydrogen bombs yielding several megatons. the human race is still here. 1 more nuke detonated in space will not make any difference, unless of course if you're a satellite company who forgot to switch off your space debris beforehand.

A nuke detonated in space, maybe not.

But a space rock this small cannot be detected that early. We can hardly track the big ones, small ones like this By the time you could scramble any response, it would be within the atmosphere, already, with a small window for interception. So either you have a big smoking crater somewhere, a dozen big smoking craters in the same somewhere (intercepted with a conventional warhead or a small nuke) or an EMP blast and shockwave taking out all the unshielded electronics and light structures in the area you're trying to protect and a dozen big smoking craters spread out over a wider area but still doing the same amount of damage as the original meteor (good sized nuke).

Even then, 7,000 tons (the estimated mass of the meteor before it broke up) is a whole lot of rock. To pulverize it up as effectively as the atmosphere did, you'd have to create a blast as big as it created when it blew up on entry. Or you add your nuclear blast to the entry blast... creating even more damage than the meteor already did. Most of the damage was caused by the air blast and not the meteor striking the ground. Same as with the Tunguska meteorite.

So... use a big explosion in the air to stop another big explosion in the air... not a good idea. Nuke tests do little damage because they're done faaaaaaar away from civilization. Nuke blasts in the air over a populated area would simply be a way of causing billions of dollars in damage to transport, communication and electrical infrastructure. (A good idea of what a nuke over populated areas can do can be found in Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns", where Russia develops a massive nuke specifically to destroy America's telecommunications network)