Nuclear setup is Idiotic-- possible spoiler

I don't see how. The nuclear option was put in place because they believed it would destroy any pathogen, putting an end to the threat. Such a blast would dissipate over time and be localized and not a threat to the world. What they could not do is anticipate a mutation that would thrive under a nuclear blast.

Well first I don’t know anything about Michael Crichton’s background so I’m not going to call him anything.

Well the Andromeda strain isn’t any form of exotic matter like dark matter that we can detect the gravitational pull of but doesn’t interact with electromagnetic fields. In fact we know it is ordinary matter because it does interact with electromagnetic fields allowing the scientists to see it. It doesn’t matter if the electromagnetic wavelengths are in the visible or non visible wavelength regime because we can either see the crystalline structure with either an optical microscope or microscopes that work at the other wavelengths that they had in their lab. Although technically a full quantum treatment would be needed to identify the exact ionizing energies required to ionize the electrons in the crystalline structure that interact with the electromagnetic field it is easy enough to conceptualize just using the Bohr model of the atom to understand that once a photon of energy (E=hf) equal to the binding energy of the electrons in the atoms of the crystalline structure collides with the electrons that the crystalline structure will be destroyed. This is just if we illuminated the target with electromagnetic wavelengths of high enough frequency without even resorting to the energy released in nuclear processes. The energy levels of the particles released in a nuclear reaction that would collide with the electrons in the crystalline structure would far exceed by orders of magnitude the energy to overcome their binding energies, ionizing the electrons and destroying the crystalline structure.