I don't think the comparison is fair because chemical reactions and how they work was a part of the model of the theory that nuclear testing might blow up the world. We were dealing with real, testable models of the world all the way up to the nuclear tests.

This is more like, if I smash two fish together in the Large Hadron Collider there's a chance the universe ends. Which no one would tell you with a straight face was remotely possible. But! It's never been done before, so, possible?

We're human beings. One of the things humans do is project. We do it all the time. To the entire animal kingdom, to the gods of our theologies, you get where I'm going with this?

Well now our gods have come to visit us and much like the gods of our fantasies, they're proxies, a mirror to the best and worst of ourselves. Because we still largely operate on fear, we have a camp of end-of-the-worlders who believe these gods are ready to judge us guilty and murderbot us all.

Imagine if we were a species where fear was not the dominant feeling. We'd in all likelihood imagine transformers were harbingers of something else entirely.