This quite strongly depends on the composition of the metorite and the angle at which it enters the atmosphere.
The Chelyablinsk meteor entered at a very shallow angle & was a chondrite with little internal strngth, so it disintegrated over a longer distance forming a “line burst” rather than a single point airburst.
Had it entered more steeply, then it would have concentrated it’s KE over a much smaller area, causing much more damage.
A nuclear bomb may take a few ms, but after a few 100ms, you’ve got a dense, hot plasma in a small volume. Sounds a lot like the result of a metorite airburst! And indeed, people use the same codes that are used to model nuclear explosions to model meteor airbursts.
Moreover to that - as far as I understand the Tall el-Hammam's paper, the only reason why they ruled out nuclear explosion is "because of the age of the site". Other than that (as I understand), it's indistinguishable.
Even though an atomic bomb blast is not applicable because of the historic absence of atomic explosions in the area, an atomic blast produces a wide range of melt products that are morphologically indistinguishable from the melted material found at TeH (Fig. 51). These include shocked quartz64; melted and decorated zircon grains (Fig. 51a, b); globules of melted material (Fig. 51c, d); meltglass containing large vesicles lined with Fe-rich crystals likely deposited by vapor deposition (Fig. 51e, f); spherules embedded in a meltglass matrix (Fig. 51g, h). Also, atomic detonations can replicate the physical destruction of buildings, the human lethality, and the incineration of a city, as occurred in World War II.
added: though, I forget to mention, that they also found many chemical elements and compositions that are hard to find under normal conditions (atomic bomb tests included as I understood), but abundant in meteorites.
The Chelyablinsk meteor entered at a very shallow angle & was a chondrite with little internal strngth, so it disintegrated over a longer distance forming a “line burst” rather than a single point airburst.
Had it entered more steeply, then it would have concentrated it’s KE over a much smaller area, causing much more damage.
A nuclear bomb may take a few ms, but after a few 100ms, you’ve got a dense, hot plasma in a small volume. Sounds a lot like the result of a metorite airburst! And indeed, people use the same codes that are used to model nuclear explosions to model meteor airbursts.