This story originates in The Woodlands, located halfway between between Mike's spacious home and my own poor hovel...The movie cited in the article concerned a group of space cowboys who saved our planet by blowing up a large space rock hurtling toward Earth...Turns out that with a few tweaks it's a viable solution against real astronomical collisions...
"If you've seen those movies, they're completely bogus," Lindley Johnson, the planetary defense officer at NASA headquarters, said during a media session on asteroids and the art of protecting Earth from them held at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference taking place here this week. "That's not how we would use a nuclear explosive device to do this at all."
I suspect that certain politicians may be against the idea since it would prevent peaceful planetoid immigrants from migrating to Earth to take their rightful share in our wealth......Ben