Volume is unimportant. What's important is mass. If you convert 1 ton of packed filler to 1 ton of gas, it's still 1 ton of gas. It's the mass that provides the force, not the volume.
And this thing is the width of a telephone pole.
Say a nuke explodes 0.5 Km from the side of this thing (getting it within 0.5 Km seems pretty damned impressive at the ranges we're talking, especially given 'Mars lander ellipse using planetary gravity to assist bringing us in', but let's go with that by saying we have some kind of super-tech targeting system or the like that we come up with by dumping craptons of money at the problem...which is supposition, but why not here?). Let's say it has ten tons of packed filler around the warhead to create an expanding sphere of gas or plasma or whatever. Ten tons seems...like a lot, considering that every ton you put in means you need X tons more FUEL to get the darned rocket to reach the velocities you need, which means a bigger rocket, which means more fuel, which means...there's a diminishing return, here, as noted by the writer of XKCD when he discussed lifting yourself off the ground using multiple AK-47's with firing downward from a fixed platform.
Yeah, he worked that out (with all kinds of different possible choices, over pages and pages). ^_^
Anyway, let's say 10 tons, exploding 0.5 Km away.
Now that 10 tons is going to be dispersed into a rapidly expanding sphere. By the time it reaches the Darned Adamantium Noodle (henceforth referred to as the DAN™), how much of that mass is actually going to impact on the length of the DAN? We'd have to actually go into some serious calculations to figure this out, since the explosion will continue expanding with the gas - still spreading out, still more diffuse - spreading further along the length of the DAN, and we're getting into some pretty impressive Integration to figure it all out (constantly reducing density of expanding gas/whatever cloud versus the ever-increasing length of DAN it encounters).
However, the DAN is still a telephone pole in width slowly becoming an increasingly larger thread slicing into an ever-propagating, ever-thinning SPHERICAL (not circular, this is in three dimensions) blast. Picture a piano wire slicing into an ever-thinning (somehow) orange. How much of the orange's mass is the piano wire actually encountering?
A miniscule amount. Like, ridiculously miniscule, since as the sphere expands its density continues to dramatically decrease.
I'm sure there's a whole lot more to it than this (and I'm totally disinterested in working out the numbers, here, because I got sick of Calculus two-and-a-half decades ago and reaaaaaally hated Integration), but this is a starting point.
More importantly, all of the brilliant NASA scientists haven't come up with this plan (the filler on the nuke) to overcome the issue of 'direct contact needed'. I, myself, had thought that there would be some pressure from particles and so forth, but you'd need to be REALLY close or else 'inverse square of distance' means you get almost nothing. But if the NASA scientists - who know a crapton more than me, let's face it - say 'nope, need direct contact for nuke to do anything to advancing stellar object', I'm not going to argue with them.
...thinking like that got us in the situation where a large percent of people value youtube over epidemiologists and their expertise.
NOT that I'm saying anything of the sort is happening here.
Anywhoo, the NASA scientists say 'Direct contact' and haven't come up with the 'filler' idea to 'create' a blast, I'm pretty okay saying 'that's probably not feasible'.
On the subject of 'more money'.
I agree that more money would happen. And a lot of the time, more money really helps make things move quickly. But there's still testing. Dead-ends. Working on something we've NEVER done before, starting on a basis of technology that is incapable of doing that thing. More money doesn't make brains work better, and it doesn't necessarily cut the time necessary to test and make sure we have the proper system. And here, we have 1.3 years. Less, actually.
EASIER, I agree. But is easier enough, given the hurdles?
I'm no expert, myself, so I can't say. My opinion is 'probably not, that seems like a lot in 1.3 years'. Less than 1.3, due to 'DAN will hit critical point where we CAN'T budge it enough' before that, and also 'before anything cooperative starts, fair bit of arguing about what's to be done' (even if that's only a month of crabbing between world governments, we're now down to 1.2 years, and I feel a month isn't an outrageous kind of estimation given what we see normally...might be optimistic, really). I'm having difficulties wrapping my head around the idea of world governments and big corporations springing into collective action on day one. Or day twenty.
Why not try, I mean we might win the lottery.
But I wouldn't at all be optimistic.
Edit:
[DAN]
SCHTONK