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If your bad guys can get high enough to sever your cable, they can get high enough to do a kinetic or powered bombardment and cause magnitudes more damage.

¿Por qué no los dos?

Plus accidents are more likely than you think. A rocket just exploded this morning, and read up on rates of railroad or shipping screwups. A train full of apples and pallets of kleenex going over ain't a big deal but the same containers falling out of the sky will certainly cause more damage.

A bomb on wheels that rides the cable before exploding.

I can’t take a tube of toothpaste on a plane. How am I going to pack a bomb large enough to cause that much damage. Why don’t people blow up planes with that method today?

If a tether breaks high up, then only a few kilometers of the tether hit the ground. Anything higher burns up on the way down (since it is very thin, so surface plasma heating doesn't take long to destroy it)

They're probably better off just flying into a building again.