It's a massive spy network, if weaponized.

Lowering the orbits just means that we get back to normal faster, not that the it's impossible.

- You are not targeting individual satellites; you're setting off nuclear warheads in space, and relying on the EMP to disable all satellites within a large radius of the blast - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse

or

- You're nuking the ground-based command & control centers for those satellites. Again, nothing like 10,000 missiles needed.

(Or both.)

To target 10,000 satellites directly, the "obvious" weapon would be a few satellite-launch rockets, lofting tons of BB's (or little steel bolts, or whatever) - which would become a sort of long-duration artillery barrage shrapnel in orbit.

This is like bowling, you hit one, it hits the other one etcétéras.

[1] https://spacestatsonline.com/launches/country

The article mentions a few months at 480 km. I'm a little skeptical about this figure though, because the last tracked piece from an NRO satellite that was shot down at ~250 km by SM-3 missile in operation burnt frost, lasted 20 months in space before reentry. SpaceX is probably using a statistical cutoff percentage of fragments to calculate the time. But all the pieces are dangerous uncontrolled hypervelocity projectiles. Spain lost a military communications satellite a few days ago from a collision with a tiny undetermined space debris.

But so far it's not anything like in Hollywood movies, it's just a graph slowly going up. There are about 12000 satellites orbiting earth. That looks like a lot on a map, but 12000 objects spread over an area larger than the surface of the earth isn't all that much

Like all exponential processes it will become a major issue if we don't address it, but this is one that starts pretty slow and is well monitored