There were some echoes of the idea that modern science might develop weapon technology that could destroy the world prior to WWI, but it was not very common.

Here's an example from 1896, in which Thomas Edison is imagined to have invented a method of destroying entire countries — even the world — using push-button technology.

But in general this sentiment seems to have really gotten boosted by the run-up to World War I (think H.G. Wells) and flourished in the interwar period. In the 1920s you had major US newspapers running stories about how science was going to unlock atomic energy (a theme that really started up around 1908, with Soddy's popular The Interpretation of Radium) and possibly destroy the world (not in Soddy, but easy to extrapolate from). By the 1930s it became a trite thing to remark about how science was working on new world-destroying weapons, all sentiments that would reinforce and inform the reactions to the atomic bomb in 1945.

Even after the atomic bomb, there was not much significant effort to try and reign-in scientific development (though scientists feared it was right around the corner). You can see the impact of some of these technological fears in documents like the Hague convention, which have some provisions related to new technologies (banning indiscriminate aerial bombings of cities, banning poison gases), but these target the use and not manufacture/development of weapons. I would not rank the actual sentiment to do anything about the invention of new weapons very high prior to World War II.

Spencer Weart's Nuclear Fear has a lot about pre-World War II fears of science destroying the world in the early chapters, as part of the "ground-laying" of sentiment that would later come into play once nuclear technology was actually weaponized.