[jjk166]

The author's logic is that only things comparable in scale to a volcano can cancel out the volcano by brute force, and nuclear detonations are thousands to millions of times smaller than volcanic eruptions. Proposals for things like this involve using nuclear detonations to make small but critical disruptions to systems, so the logic doesn't apply, but without actually digging into it you generally wouldn't know that's what the plan entails. Admittedly, it's unintuitive to think of nuclear detonations as a precise scalpel instead of a blunt cudgel. It also doesn't help that the well thought out proposals often get crudely parroted, so "collapse the well 1 km down to choke off the flow of oil" becomes "blow up the well".

[Brian_K_White]

I would think the biggest point about collapsing a well is that the well IS a human-made, human-scale object. It IS a blunt instrument not a pin prick in that case.