If an asteroid was hurtling towards Earth and a nuclear missile had fired at it and it exploded, would the remaining

Question: If an asteroid was hurtling towards Earth and a nuclear missile had fired at it and it exploded, would the remaining pieces still cause any damage to Earth? ( if the asteroid was about the size of a double decker bus)
- Keywords:
  asteroid,
  exploded
Asked by taraiscool to Amy, Grant, Martin, Shawn, Usman on 13 Mar 2013.
- Martin Archer answered on 13 Mar 2013:
  
  Asteroids about the size of a double decker bus aren’t really any threat at all. They should completely burn up in the atmosphere, so I wouldn’t fire any nuked at it. You have mentioned a good plot hole with Armageddon though, the fragments of a giant asteroid blown up with a nuclear weapon could indeed be a real threat still.
- Grant Kennedy answered on 13 Mar 2013:
  
  If you managed to fragment an asteroid into smaller pieces it would be a bit less dangerous, since the smaller the bits are the easier it is for them to burn up in the atmosphere. How things really happen would depend on how far away the asteroid was when it got nuked, since if it was nearby then all the pieces would still be close together and it could behave just like it hadn’t been nuked at all.
  
  More realistically, what we might do is spot a dangerous asteroid long before it might actually hit us, like decades earlier, and maybe send a spacecraft to push it onto a slightly different orbit so that it’s no longer dangerous.
  g

Question: If an asteroid was hurtling towards Earth and a nuclear missile had fired at it and it exploded, would the remaining pieces still cause any damage to Earth? ( if the asteroid was about the size of a double decker bus)