“Exactly,” Compton said, and with that gravity! “It would be the ultimate catastrophe. Better to accept the slavery of the Nazis than to run the chance of drawing the final curtain on mankind!”
When Teller informed some of his colleagues of this possibility, he was greeted with both skepticism and fear. Hans Bethe immediately dismissed the idea, but according to author Pearl Buck, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Arthur Compton was so concerned that he told Robert Oppenheimer that if there were even the slightest chance of this “ultimate catastrophe” playing out, all work on the bomb should stop.
So a study was commissioned to explore the matter in detail, and six months before the Trinity test, the very first detonation of nuclear device, Edward Teller and Emil Konopinski announced their findings in a report with the ominous title “Ignition of the Atmosphere With Nuclear Bombs.”
“It is shown that, whatever the temperature to which a section of the atmosphere may be heated, no self-propagating chain of nuclear reactions is likely to be started. The energy losses to radiation always overcompensate the gains due to the reactions.”
They had almost precisely his reaction:
https://www.insidescience.org/manhattan-project-legacy/atmosphere-on-fire
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2019/09/12/the_fear_that_a_nuclear_bomb_could_ignite_the_atmosphere.html