Every other “solution” involves intricate tricks of trying hook the asteroid, deflect it with nonexistent rockets, ion drives, nuke drives, solar sails, etc, etc, etc.
They pretend those are solutions - but NONE have been tested, nor sent into space on intercept missions.
NONE of those magic devices exist: NONE are designed, built, tested, rigged up, attached to missiles, or even of a SIZE that can be attached to rockets.
NOBODY has actually come up with a tested design to hook onto a spinning irregular mass only slightly smaller than a good sized hill EXACTLY on its center of gravity and on its axis of rotation and “pull” with some nonexistent mount, eyebolt, and pivot: all by remote control of course, and from a mission that far exceeds ANY previous manned flight.
But the same people who can’t pull a mountain in space away from its course denigrate through elaborate theories disposing of the residue of a simple H-bomb blast - that will have pulverized much/some/all of the original rock.
The problem is that these same research simply hate the idea of blowing nuclear bombs in space to protect the earth - so they are forced to come up with theorectical problems.
An h-bomb’s destructive force on earth is dependent on atmospherics to conduct the concussive forces of the blast...the concussive shock and massive heating of the air do the most damage. Closer in, of course the heat and radiation does a lot of direct damage but with out atmosphere the damage radius is fairly limited.
So you have to bury the bomb in any large asteroid for it to do any good. Smaller asteroids or icy commets may be melted by a sufficiently close atomic release. Yet, in space an atomic flash would be brief and intense like a large flashbulb with a spherical out put levels of thermal and multispectral radiation which would decline with the square of the distance as the pulse expanded out ward.
And that is the problem...transporting a suitable bomb to a large asteroid, then getting it buried deep enough in a fissure that it would split the asteroid or shaping the charge so that a huge amount of ejecta is thrown out into space, the force of which acts as a chemical
rocket which alters the asteroids course.
That is why nukes are poo poohed. I think when it came to “saving the planet”, even the most PC types would “grudgingly” approve the use of nukes if the science supported their use.
Still, I’d bet desperate governments might still authorize nukes as a “hail Mary” last ditch effort to stop a mountain size asteroid from hitting the Earth