As a prospective space pirate, I believe that would be a good time to shelf the question of raw military might, and bring up the prospect of Kessler Syndrome an

As a prospective space pirate, I believe that would be a good time to shelf the question of raw military might, and bring up the prospect of Kessler Syndrome and Earthbound dissenters/sympathizers. The Martian independence play is to just put a bunch of fragmentation grenades into LEO, rather than mess around with nukes. Nobody who expects to keep living on Earth would ever do something so foolish, but if you wanted to cut ties with your homeworld in a hurry, without killing anyone directly, that would certainly do it.