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I'm told there's a quite a few nuclear-related fields where the USA stopped doing research a while back, but certain other countries... didn't.

I'm going to guess that at current tech, the device would manage to turn only a small percentage of the energy yield into a collimated beam before being vaporized by the explosion. The rest of it would be omidirectional - and exploding nuclear devices in orbit has been shown to do bad things...

Laser weapons of the "melt a hole through the satellite" level, on the other hand, run into a basic physics problem if mounted on something in space - dumping waste heat. Vacuum is a good insulator.