Somewhere between science fiction and survival planning, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have quietly modeled one of humanity's most consequential contingencies: using a nuclear warhead to redirect a city-killing asteroid. Their simulations suggest that X-ray radiation from a nearby detonation—not the blast itself—could vaporize the asteroid's surface and alter its course, a mechanism as elegant as it is unsettling. The work does not yet answer whether the resulting fragments would scatter harmlessly or reassemble into a new threat, leaving the most important question sus