Yet, writing in 1914, just before the outbreak of the Great War, H. G. Wells did make such a prediction, influenced by the physicist Frederick Soddy, a collaborator of Ernest Rutherford. Wells’s book, The World Set Free, recounts the story of a war which erupts in Europe in 1958, from there spreading throughout the world. In the war, a terrible weapon is used, constructed from a radioactive substance called Carolinum. Hundreds of these bombs, which Wells called “atomic bombs,” are dropped on the world’s cities, causing immense devastation.

XREF: Wells's 1914 prediction predates the atomic bomb's real-world development by three decades, a notable example of fiction anticipating technology.

Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Moderni…, loc. 146