The concept itself dates back to the beginning of the Cold War. If Poseidon has warheads, which is speculated to be only 2MT, no tsunami wave will arise from it.
That is 1,000 times bigger than most nuclear weapons tested in water... most of which are 2 to 5KT...
Nukes detonated in sea water are rather different from nukes detonated in air and their effect is rather different too... in air the flash carries the heat great distances and the blast wave moves quickly and easily through the air, but in water the blast wave pushes against water which does not compress, but the heat transfer is much much greater and the effect of billions of tons of super heated salt water is frightening...
That big white ball of what appears to be water in a nuclear blast is salt water heated to several thousand degrees C that would flow through a ship and cook people like a chicken in a blast furnace for heating steel...
Poseidon is a revolutionary system, but only if we consider the naval warfare.
If we think for a moment what it really is, we came to the conclusion that it is an underwater cruise missile.
I thought that was obvious... a cruise missile that no ABM system could stop... or even see.
Except the size of the weapon means it might carry quite a few nuclear warheads that can be dropped along the way as it navigates its way to its final destination... so almost like a bomber that suicides on the last target.
Poseidon doesn't really need a submarine/ship. Thanks to the unlimited range, it can be launched from specially prepared quays. Russia has a huge coastline in the north.
For surprise you could load hundreds of them in the main cargo bay of a large roll on roll off cargo ship.... sail to the middle of the south atlantic and open the front and the rear doors and with each weapon on a trolley... roll them out into the water and start their motors and off they go in all directions... do it in the middle of the night... release a dozen at a time and have them drop to the bottom at that point in the ocean to wait a day or a week and then start up and go on their way...
Or just start up straight away..... even if a HATO ship sees your ship doing this what can it do?
If it sinks the cargo ship the cargo ship can leave its cargo doors open and the weapons can leave the cargo bay into the ocean as the ship sinks.
Very much by today's standards. However, whether 2MT is able to cause a devastating tsunami. Because that's the idea behind the Poseidon weapon, it's supposed to destroy port cities with a tsunami wave. Perhaps the second option detonation in the port in very shallow water. During the Cold War, the 100MT warhead was installed plan. I just don't know how much such a modern 100MT warhead would weigh?
Whether it causes a tsunami or not it will create a cloud of superheated salt water and mud that would envelop the port and be rather lethal in its own right.
The Tsar Bomba (AN602) was a One of a Kind. The explosion measured at 58MT which was somewhat larger than the expected 51MT.
It was indeed possible to produce a 100MT bomb but they never did. In fact there was an actual plan to develop a 150MT warhead for the UR-500 missile - but this was also shelved.
The problem is the same as with aircraft engines... if you double the engine power of a prop driven aircraft you don't increase flight speed by double... a 2,000 horsepower engine for an I-16 does not double its flight speed, and with nuclear bombs doubling their power does not double the damage or double the blast radius...
In terms of blast damage using five smaller warheads spread around a city is vastly more effective than a single warhead that is much bigger than all the smaller weapons combined can manage.
It is like the cluster bomb effect... a 1kg bomb is very powerful and can easily kill people within a 10m radius, a 100kg bomb doesn't kill people more that it lands on and the blast radius to kill people is not 100 times bigger.
100 x 1kg bombs dropped 10m apart in a grid would be more powerful and more lethal to a spread out target than a single 100kg bomb despite containing the same amount of explosives.
The difference of course is that single very powerful bombs are needed for protected targets like bunkers and strengthened structures like dams and even bridges.
More powerful nukes for Poseidon would just increase the volume of superheated material generated at the explosion and of course as that rises up as a super heated gas the water will rush in from all directions to fill the new empty space once the blast wave subsides.
Of course there is no reason to believe they couldn't fit warheads on the Poseidon with 20kgs of solid rocket propellent to launch from the water onto the land to take out port and coastal cities... the size and weigh of the weapon means payloads can be large (volume) and heavy... and more than one can be carried simply by adding a payload section to the platform.
In a specialised sub that might be a problem regarding available space but a roll on roll off cargo ship or even ferry could easily be adapted for different length variations.
Scientists realised that using multiple smaller warhead was more destructive than using one extremely big one.
And more cost effective.
The more powerful warheads were for hard targets... the 20MT warheads of the SS-18 and the rather big warheads of the SS-9 before it were intended for Cheyanne mountain complex in the US (famous for SG-1 filming), and also attacking US ICBM fields... if you fly a 20MT warhead into the ground and then detonate it the tunnels and bunkers will be hit by massive seismic waves and collapse like in a earthquake depending on their distance to the point of impact.
For city targets larger numbers of smaller warheads are much more efficient.
Will most Poseidon stuff to suitable thread... 
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