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Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2
Reasonable mass orbital and interplanetary vessels are certainly WMDs, but they tend to be WMDs on the lower end of the scale. Let's say you've got a 1000 metric ton ship moving at 100 kilometers/sec. That's a nice clip for interplanetary travel, beyond current state of the art.
It'll hit with a force of about 1 megaton, if I didn't slip a digit in my BOTEC. OK, that's certainly a WMD. It's as big as a biggish strategic nuke.
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I check your BOTEC
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But the flipside of that is that we already have 1 megaton nukes. We've had them for over half a century. So such a ship doesn't really add anything to the picture that isn't already present, and it would be an inefficient way to deliver a 1 megaton boom compared to a nuke.
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What does make a difference is that the control problem on a nuke is a lot easier than the control problem on an airliner. You can lock your strategic weapons away in guarded armouries, and exercise extreme vetting over the officers who control them. But freighters and passenger liners have to be out and about with all sorts of people having easy access to them.
In September 2001 I was running an SF campaign in which the PCs were involved in counter-terrorism in my usual Jon's-Law-obsessed interstellar SF setting. One of my players was from New York. I had to end the campaign abruptly.