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KE payloads are probably the most useful. Scatter lead shot and let Kessler take over. Explosives are quite a bit weaker, though explosively formed projectiles might be useful- or something like a claymore spraying shrapnel.
In any case, they may be intending to detonate a nuke in orbit for the EMP effect. It would probably knock out everything that’s not military (like Starlink.), in an area much larger than what conventional weapons would do.
Nuking orbit like that would piss off a lot of people; including NATO. (And presumably China.)
Unless you want to take out a whole bunch of them. Swarm of nanosats with some kind of miniexplosives or even just one-use engines to force deorbiting would probably still be more efficient, unless...
Unless you want to go for geostationary. A real crowd of satellitrs which have a feature of always looking at the same part of the Earth. While it would be very easy to send a boom device to low earth orbit (also very crowded), erasing a bunch of satellites there would be a temporary inconvenience (let's not talk about Kessler) since a lot of what's important is either a global constellation (starlink, gps) or has redundancies (earth observation comes to mind). But explode a nuke in the geostationary over the US and suddenly America has no sat TV/radio, no weather sat coverage and it's harder to patch up than "just" replacing missing nodes of a constellation.
I think they'd need to send something bigger than tsar bomba up there to do that, wouldn't even a nuclear explosive lack it's terran scale in space without the enhancing effects of an atmosphere? Edit: ohhhh nevermind, EMP.
Also that would certainly be a MAD event where we'd be forced to retaliate on a nuclear scale?