[algore]

EXCEPT for “the Chinese stunt where they deliberately intercepted one of their own defunct meteorological satellites.”

I might argue that the “Chinese Stunt” was more damaging because it is hard to track all the very small debris, and something untrackable can still do massive damage.

if there is a large war with countries shooting up satellites there could be so much debris we might be limited to low earth orbit for the duration of the human species

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

There was the cosmos-Iridium disaster, which was equally damaging. Iridium was paying a company to warn them of near approaches (within 5 km) so they could maneuver if necessary. The Space Command TLE (Two-line-elements) predicted that the two would would pass withing 70 meters, so someone dropped the ball. (TLE only had a nominal accuracy of 5 km, so the joint uncertainly - to the same confidence level - was more like 7 km. IOW, they would pass within 70 meters +/- 7000 km.

I actually saw the radar tapes of the debris field from PAVE PAWS Beale. Beale was tasked to track Iridium on the next orbit after the collision. The first orbit of the debris field cut the corner of the radar's field of view, and 90 minutes later the debris field was tracked as blossomed. Beale tracked it again on orbit 2 (the first orbit being orbit 0), when it had further blossomed and much of the debris de-orbited because collision caused it hit the atmosphere.