Could deliberately induced Kessler Syndrome stop ICBMs?

In a previous question I asked how Mutually Assured Destruction could be made not assured. Most of the highly rated answers focused on political methods, but one answer raised the possibility that Kessler Syndrome might make ICBMs impracticable - it's this idea that I'd like to test for practicality.

Given the Earth, with present day technology, is it technically feasible to fill LEO with enough stuff that any ICBMs fired will have only a small chance (let's define it as 5%) of making it to their target?

For the purposes of this question I'm not really interested in economics or politics - feel free to assume that the entire industrial output of the Earth goes towards achieving this, and that world peace magically breaks out for as long as it takes - I want to know if it's possible from an engineering and physics perspective.

I've tagged this as science-based instead of hard-science because it's likely to require a bit of XKCD What If?-type guesswork, but I'd like to see answers that include calculations and that are based on empirical evidence.

posted over 5 years ago

walrus‭

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