12 Monkeys – my new favourite TV series

Nuclear winter, I remember the first article I read about that in the article Sagan wrote for Parade Magazine. I was only a sophomore in high school at the time but it was obvious from the article that instead of investigating the climatic effects of nuclear detonations they began with the dramatic result and sought mechanisms to create it afterward.

sturgishooper
June 12, 2015 at 2:49 pm
“There is no deliverable nuclear device anywhere near the yield of the one-off Tsar Bomba today. The average yield of the ~15,000 presently deployed nukes is around 250 KT, not 50 MT. Even one MT warheads are rare, if any still exist. (It has been a long time since it was my job to know.)”
There is indeed no such device, but not for the lack of technical possibity.
That is entirely my point: If war as the TOTAL action of the state were still possible, the nuclear powers would build bigger and bigger warheads, because they could. But they don’t.
So we will never see a WW III as a REAL war; but tactical skirmishes and pretend wars fought with sub par weapons. The real weapons can now not even be built anymore.

It occurs to me that perhaps I’m not making my point explicitly enough.
No one builds three-stage thermonuclear weapons for the simple reason that they have no military use. You’re concerned about a large-scale nuclear war, but such a conflict would never, ever, under any circumstances be fought with Tsar Bombas. That device was just another of Khrushchev’s many hare-brained schemes, of the sort that got him kicked out of the Politburo. It was a PR stunt without any military application.
Devices of its size are undeliverable. They are far too massive for even the largest ICBMs, such as the Russian SS-18 (R-36), with a throw weight of less than 20,000 pounds. As noted, even the heaviest bomber could at most carry one, which would make the likely loss of many such attacking bombers operationally lunatic.
I don’t know what kind of war you imagine being fought with a few 100-MT nukes, but there is no way it could threaten the continued existence of humanity, let alone life on earth.

Wayne,
Do you mean BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) v IMF/World Bank or PIIGS (Portugal, Italy Ireland, Greece and Spain) v. EU/European banks (BRIC can become BRICS if South Africa be added, but it usually isn’t)?
The Saudis, as you note, do want to maintain their market share by driving higher cost, unconventional US producers out of business. They also might want to get as much money out of the ground as possible and salt it away in Switzerland because they sense their time is limited, so price doesn’t matter.
The US tolerates Saudi suppression of the price of crude because it keeps American consumers happy, even though it hurts the economy overall. It also punishes evil Big Oil, at least those who pump from their own fields as well as refine. It does however work against the Green goal of killing fossil fuels, while also perhaps hastening “peak oil” (whether only in the perfervid imaginations of ecoloons or in reality).
The Saudis and other Gulf States are also, for better or worse, allies of a sort, even though the former financed ISIS before it got out of their control, and, like Pakistan, played both sides in the anti-terror game.
I’m more surprised that Russia and Iran, and their lackeys like Venezuela, who desperately need higher crude prices, have tolerated the Saudi pumpathon. Scuds from Yemen or cruise missiles from Iran could shut down the Eastern Province oil fields for as long as the Saudis’ opponents wanted.

Patrick,
The Bomba was a three-stage device, but without the DU tamper around the third stage, so that its potential ultimate yield was reduced.
For those not familiar with H-bomb design, they are fission-fusion-fission devices, getting roughly half their power from fission and fusion equally. Each stage ideally produces about ten times more energy. Hence a boosted fission implosion detonation of 50 KT triggers a second, fusion stage, the neutrons from which cause fission in the DU jacket around the imploding fusion rod, surrounded by boron foam.
Thus, Russian strategic nuclear warheads yield around 550 KT. An ideal three-stage device would yield 5.55 MT, but the Bomba was not built to be deliverable, so had ten times this energy, with massive amounts of DU around its second stage, which had the added advantage of containing the reaction fractions of a second longer.
Eric,
Yes, you could keep adding stages, as long as you had enough Pu and DU to make them. Doing so would be absurdly wasteful, however.
Maybe if you wanted to tunnel down to the MoHo with successive detonations of nuclear mining explosives, or something, but for military applications, it would be beyond absurd.