Nuclear Defense Against Kilometer-Long Asteroids

The possibility of correcting the trajectory of kilometer-long chondrite asteroids threatening the Earth with the help of nuclear explosions in near-Earth and distant outer space is assessed. It is shown that to put such asteroids on a safe trajectory requires nuclear explosions with a power of more than 100 Mt at distances of more than 100 million km from the Earth. It is also shown that at the found power it is impossible to preserve the integrity of kilometer-long asteroids because of their fragmentation. The latter circumstance makes the task of correcting the trajectories of such asteroids using nuclear explosions difficult to achieve because of the difficulties in predicting the trajectories of the fragments formed.