Well for shattering your geometry, head over to Highend3d.com, there are a number of shatter related scripts and plugins to split up your geometry.

In terms of blowing it up, they're is the very slow method (depending on density of geom, interpenetration, etc) of using maya Rigid Body Dynamics, check out the help files for them, they are very simple to setup, I also believe Digital-tutors.com has some free tutorials with rigid bodies.

Another method is to instance the geometry onto particles, this is much faster to simulate, but you won't get accurate collisions, etc, between geometry.

Chris