Yep. They realized from their calculations that a 100MT shot would not be nearly as efficient as the scaled down 50MT version actually tested. Anything above 55MT would not cause a clean "burn". It would be extremely dirty, producing titanic amounts of fallout. The Soviets realized that they would poison the entire world if they went for a 100MT. They also said that most of the energy from that high amount of burst would be directed up into space, in a greatly scaled up version of the vacuum cone that results from conventional explosives being fired off from ground level, so the pole to pole shock wave, surprisingly, might be no more than the 50MT device that was tested, but with a catastrophic level of fallout.
There were a lot of terrifying potential that was explored with nuclear weapons from the 1950s to the 70s, and some concept weapon systems were so terrifying that they stayed on the drawing board in the form of equations, thankfully. One of these was the cobalt salted warhead. Using the energy and neutron influx from the detonation to turn a shell of cobalt metal into highly radioactive cobalt which will then be dispersed over a wide area with the cobalt dust being as radioactive as the graphite on the rooftop of Chernobyl's reactor no. 4 on the very morning after the blast. The result of this cobalt salting would be that an entire area hundreds of miles in diameter would be utterly uninhabitable due to radiation, for centuries. The cobalt dust will also enter groundwater and streams, poisoning even more places and contaminating anyone, anything, and any animal that comes into contact with it. All of the calculations on paper that engineers made showed the exact yield, amount of neutron output, and thickness of the cobalt shell that is needed to create a 100% efficient cobalt bomb, a true planet killer. And all of those papers were then very quickly packed back into their briefcases and thrusted into the most secure safes they got. I don't think dinner that night, perhaps many subsequent meals for these engineers were too appetizing anymore after theoretically witnessing true cosmic horror materialize on a sheet of paper before them.
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