Side note - Regarding nuclear weapons used in space, against other such vehicles, one common SciFi (not quite hard, but much closer than many) answer is Bomb-pumped X-ray and Gamma Ray lasers. Which has at least some plausibility in terms of generating useful, longer ranged option.
Actually, even well before Forbidden Planet and This Island Earth, the Fleischer Superman cartoons (starting in 1941) showed Krypton exploding pretty spherically