Prepare a summary of the following text:
All through history there have been wars, yet mankind has survived, developed, and became civilized in spite of them. But unfortunately, as part of his development, man has learned to tap the hidden forces of our planet and use them for his purposes. Now, if his purposes are those of destruction, each fresh advance in his mastery of nature only increases the danger from war, as men learn to destroy one another in ever greater numbers, from ever greater distances, and in ever more varied and ingenious ways. Man has now discovered how to release the forces locked up in the atom. In consequence, the leading nations of the world are now making atom bombs which would almost certainly be widely used. Nobody knows what the effect of dropping such bombs on a large scale would be, but it is quite possible that the total destruction of the world and its civilization might ensue. As somebody has jokingly remarked, in the next war, men will fight with atom bombs and in the war after that with bows and arrows.