Geologic systems are more complex than this. Analyzing something like this as though it were a single system is wrought with the dangers of miscalculation.

You could locally release stresses on an incremental, short term basis this way in a local system, while at the same time increasing stresses on nearby systems which could fail even more spectacularly, especially if the increasing stresses are being moved from a less dangerous system to a more dangerous system.

I'm not suggesting the above is true in this case, but that you need to cast a pretty wide net with increasingly unknown (and perhaps unknowable) variables as you start to inject real changes into a local system and try to predict what those changes will actually do.

It's logarithmic so you'd need more like 30,000 magnitude 3 earthquakes to equal the energy of a magnitude 7. I don't think it's clear this is better. You can also make the argument that this may trigger the large earthquake that might not have happened for a long time.

It can go either way, you might get a relief of pressure or you might get an increased destabilisation in the region.

If you have an anvil hanging over your head, the potential energy that would kill you already exists. Slowly lowering the anvil makes sense. Damaging the rope holding the anvil doesn't.

At least naturally, faults release almost all their energy in the few largest events. You never see enough small earthquakes that you would "release slowly" that amount of energy. It would really need to be several orders of magnitude of more energy being released slowly.

We set off explosives to control avalanche risk.

How does the energy for the nuke itself factor into the equation though?

We are not even remotely close to being able to predict this in a way to apply it reliably. Plate tectonics and volcanology are incredibly difficult to forecast anything short-term in.

Yeah, no.

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