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During the cold war, the superpowers could have stumbled towards armageddon through muddle and miscalculation. Robert McNamara was the US defence secretary during the Cuba missile crisis. He later wrote that we then "came within a hair's breadth of nuclear war without realising it. It's no credit to us that we escaped - Khrushchev and Kennedy were lucky as well as wise." The prevailing nuclear doctrine was deterrence via the threat of "mutual assured destruction" (with the apt acronym Mad).
Each side put the "worst case" construction on whatever the other did, and overreacted. The net result was an arms race that made both less secure.
Another who spoke out after retirement was Solly Zuckerman, the UK government's longtime chief scientific adviser. He said "ideas for new weapon systems derived in the first place not from the military but from scientists and technologists merely doing what they saw to be their job: the momentum of the arms race is fuelled by technicians in governmental laboratories and in the armaments industries". In Zuckerman's view the weapons scientists were "the alchemists of our times, working in secret ... casting spells which embrace us all". The decisions that racheted up the arms race were political, but scientists who developed new weapons could not disclaim their share of the responsibility.
The great physicist Hans Bethe also came round to this view. He was the chief theorist at Los Alamos and worked on the H-bomb, but by 1995 his aversion to military research had hardened, and he urged scientists to "desist from work creating, developing, improving and manufacturing nuclear weapons and other weapons of potential mass destruction".
Some of Bethe's colleagues started a journal called the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. On its cover is a clock, and the closeness of its hands to midnight indicates the editor's judgment on how precarious the world situation is. Every few years the minute hand is shifted. When the cold war ended, and the nuclear threat eased, the Bulletin's clock was put back to 17 minutes to midnight. There was less chance of 10,000 bombs devastating our civilisation.