In this work, the Coulomb explosion of the octamer water cluster has been 
studied employing a theoretical approach. Instead of the usual methodology that 
makes use of classical molecular dynamics, time-dependent density functional 
theory has been applied to tackle the problem. This method explicitly accounts 
for the laser field and thus does not impose any constraint on the interaction 
between the laser pulse and the cluster. We focus on the effects of energetic 
changes in the system under high-intensity soft X-ray laser pulses. The motions 
of the ions and their velocities during this process show significant 
differences for the three applied laser intensities (10(14), 10(15) and 10(16) W 
cm(-2)). Very strong soft X-ray free electron laser (FEL) pulses must be short 
to allow for investigations of ultra-fast wet chemistry, according to the 
principle of collect and destroy.