Horses, Rollaboards and Nukes

I was reading the Iliad recently and I was struck by the fact that while there were a lot of horses that no one rode them, they were all used to pull chariots. Horses had been domesticated for thousands of years but no one thought to ride them. And it would be another couple thousand years before someone came up with the idea of a stirrup. This illustrates that a technology can be around for a long time and then suddenly someone will figure out a new way of using it which ends up being incredibly effective. Could this happen with Nukes?